The Benefits of Moving IT Management to the Cloud

December 5, 2018 Off By David

Article Written by Avery Phillips
 

When it comes to moving IT management to the cloud, there is no one size-fits-all strategy. In fact, patience and research are essential to making sure that a company finds the solution that is right for them. It takes time to align resources, build capacity, and engage vendors to make sure everyone is on the same page. 

Cloud solutions range from hybrid solutions, in which some information is stored locally and the rest on the cloud, to the choices between private and public cloud services. No matter which way a company chooses to go, though, there are some clear benefits of moving IT management to the cloud. 

Using a trusted IT management software can eliminate some of the problems and concerns many businesses have and make the process of moving to the cloud a much simpler one. When it comes right down to it though, what are the advantages of moving your IT to the cloud?

Speed and Agility

Your sales team is at a meeting in Minneapolis, and their presentation laptop crashes. Rather than just making do or purchasing a new laptop and creating a presentation from memory, you can instead quickly access the stored presentation from the cloud from nearly any device, new or borrowed, and you are back in business. 

This scenario sounds simplistic, and it is more related to cloud storage than overall cloud computing, but that is one of the most important components of IT management. Good IT management means you not only have more cloud storage, but you also have more computing power and can run many of your most common programs from the web. 

This makes sense for a number of reasons. First, remote work is more common than it ever has been, and providing remote employees with a solid VPN and plenty of storage and power lets them do their best work on the go while still keeping your company data secure. It means that teams who travel can implement changes and share data nearly instantly. The time to take a lead from prospect to customer is greatly reduced. 

Need to make IT changes, send out new policies for signatures, or even implement new software? With managed IT services on the crowd, changes no longer take weeks or even months to be implemented company wide, but can be completed in minutes. 

Quite simply, IT management on the cloud makes your company move faster and means you can change direction quickly when necessary.

Network Reliability

We have probably all been sitting in an office when the local servers went down and it seemed that work just grinded to a halt. In a world where so much is done digitally, network reliability and server access is essential. Cloud servers are hosted on some of the most reliable platforms in the world by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and others. 

In many applications, the cloud has been shown to have greater than 99.99 percent reliability where local servers, even with several redundancies, tend to average closer to 98 percent. Without these costly measures in place, reliability goes down, and until cloud computing it was often expressed that to get more reliability, you had to spend more. 

Cloud computing has allowed companies to dispel this myth. Reliability at an enterprise level is available to almost any small business through proper use of the cloud. This also relates to security as well, as the time it takes to resolve hacks or data breaches and the potential PR damage is significant – something we hear about in the news all the time. Cloud managed IT services mean better security that is more reliable than what is practical for most companies locally.

Long- and Short-Term Financial Advantages

In the short term, the money saved on equipment like servers dedicated to data management, the power to run those servers, and maintenance operations will be significant. Subscribing to a service has costs based on company needs or even per user and can be scaled as a company grows and can afford more cloud computing. 

In the long run, the cost savings plus the ability to scale as needed, and quickly, add up. MOre cost savings come from reliability as discussed above. Every moment a server is down can mean not only lost productivity and sales, but potentially lost customers who move on when they discover your site is down. Beyond the loss of a sale, this can me the loss of the lifetime value of a new customer. 

Remember that web users are fickle at best. If a site takes more than four seconds to load, they will move on to another one. If they are shopping and your site happens to be down at the time, they will find somewhere else to buy. Inspiring loyalty and retaining customers is all about reliability. 

While money is often one of the primary concerns, the other advantage is the time you will save.

Ability to Focus on Your Business

If you own a pizza joint, your goal is to sell more pizzas, and you would not be in business long if you struggled to do that. However, you are not an IT guru, and creating computer and networking structure, while necessary, is likely not your strong suit, nor does it make you any money. 

A cloud-based IT management system is the solution not only to save you money but to allow you to focus on what you do best: selling pizzas, or whatever it is your business focuses on. That in itself is extremely valuable. 

IT management in the cloud is not the stuff of the future – it is the stuff of now. The benefits far outweigh any disadvantages, and if you are not moving to the cloud, your competition likely already is. Of course, it is important to have patience and be sure you are ready to move, but once you are ready you too can take advantage of reliability, financial savings, and the speed and agility that comes with IT Management in the cloud. Not only will your bottom line be healthier, but your customers and employees will benefit from you being able to focus on what you do best: running your business.

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About the Author


Avery Phillips is a unicorn of a human being who loves all things relating to people and their entrepreneurial spirits. Comment down below or tweet her @a_taylorian.