Cloud hosting for business offers several key advantages for companies looking to get the latest and greatest business infrastructure and software for their day-to-day operations.
One of the biggest benefits of using a hosted cloud service rather than investing in the infrastructure needed to create a private cloud yourself is in the scalability of a hosted cloud service.
What does scalability in the cloud mean for your business?
It means:
Not Paying for Unnecessary Infrastructure
Building a company-wide infrastructure for running your business-critical apps and sharing common data files can be expensive. In many cases, businesses end up buying more hardware than they actually need to help them cope with spikes in application use or projected business growth.
For example, say that you have 300 employees in total. If every employee were running your business app at the same time, then you’d need a server that could handle the load of running 300 simultaneous instances of your business app at the same time.
But, what if you had a second app that employees might need to log into at the same time? Or if you were to hire additional personnel as your business grows?
This is why many companies acquire more total server capacity than they actually need. However, it’s rare for 100% of all employees to be on a business app at the same time, and if you have a server capacity of 500 users, but only grow about 20% a year, it would be years before you’d have enough users to justify the excess capacity.
The scalability of using a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) takes the guesswork out of planning your server capacity. Rather than having to anticipate how much load you’ll need to handle 2-3 years from now, you can rent just the space you need for right now, and up the space you rent on the CSP’s servers as your needs increase from month to month.
By not paying for more infrastructure than your company actually needs, using a hosted cloud solution can save your company an enormous amount of capital year over year.
Always Having as Much Server Capacity as You Need
As mentioned in the above section, trying to future-proof your infrastructure to handle growing demand can be expensive. However, failing to have enough server capacity to handle the load of all the employees who use your business-critical applications can be disastrous.
Issues caused by overloaded servers include:
- Greatly reduced information download/upload speeds;
- Inability to log into important applications;
- Loss of data; and
- Total server crashes with extended downtime.
Just to name a few potential problems.
So, just as it’s important to not pay for more infrastructure than you need, it’s also important to have enough capacity to cover your immediate needs.
With the scalability of hosted cloud services, getting the infrastructure you need couldn’t be simpler. As your demand for server capacity grows, you can simply rent more space on your CSP’s servers to keep up. This helps you avoid the issues that come with server traffic overloads.
In a way, avoiding server traffic overload can even help increase your total uptime by helping to prevent server crashes.
Greater Control Over Your Monthly Expenses
Managing the monthly budget is complicated enough without having to account for large expenditures in acquiring extraneous IT infrastructure and the power, maintenance, and personnel needed to run said infrastructure.
Unexpected issues with managing an internal IT infrastructure can complicate the monthly expense budget by adding large capital expenses for parts and labor, particularly as upgrades to the system become necessary.
With a secure hosted cloud solution, however, you can turn the unpredictable capital expenses of managing an internal cloud infrastructure into a steady, easy-to-budget-for operating expense that remains consistent from month to month.
In short, the scalability of the cloud makes your business more flexible and growth-ready, while providing you with greater control over your costs at the same time.
Want to know more about how the cloud can work for you? Download our eBook for many more ways your company can benefit from the cloud.
