According to Fortune Business Insights, the cloud computing industry is expected to grow at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 17.9% over the next seven years, upon which it is forecasted to reach a total market value of $791.48 billion by 2028. In other words, the cloud is big business!
These days, businesses have the ability to choose from a variety of on-demand cloud-based services, each of which is tailored to a certain business requirement that helps them streamline their operations, such as networks, storage, apps, or software. With that said, let’s look at four of the key factors that enable cloud-based solutions to boost business growth.
Competitive advantage
For a company to have the best chance of succeeding, its leadership must maintain a planned and deliberate approach to obtaining a competitive advantage over its rivals, and deploying cloud infrastructure is a fantastic method to accomplish this task. According to a recent Verizon survey, 77 percent of businesses believe cloud technology provides them with a competitive edge, with 16 percent believing this edge to be significant.
However, despite the fact that cloud computing is becoming more popular, many organizations still want to keep everything on-site, primarily through fear of risk, reluctance to change, or the simple fact that they are tied into contracts with legacy systems (or are still paying off expensive on-site installations). Unfortunately, these businesses will be at a significant disadvantage when competing with those who have the cloud on their side. The irony is that they will almost certainly be compelled to convert to cloud solutions in the near future anyway.
Increased productivity
One of the most notable advantages of cloud-based businesses is their considerably greater productivity levels across their workforce. As long as you have all of your services, tools, and information stored on a cloud-based platform, your employers will have the ability to work on the move, collaborate with colleagues across departments, and contribute to projects despite their physical location.
Furthermore, cloud-based storage solutions such as data warehouses and data lakes assist in reducing the negative impacts of organizational silos, which are known to stifle productivity and cross-departmental cooperation. Now, business leaders have the luxury of comparing the benefits of these services, such as a data lake vs. delta lake, before choosing the solution that best suits their organizational needs and has the capacity to provide maximal boosts to productivity.
Furthermore, the majority of cloud technologies also allow for the automation of certain operations, like administrative chores, project management, and email marketing (to name a few), which frees up human resources to work on higher-yielding tasks. When using cloud computing services, workers also get to benefit from the lightning-fast performance since most cloud providers use enterprise-grade SSD storage, servers, and CPUs. This drastically reduces downtime, resulting in long-term productivity benefits.
Flexibility and scaling
Since most cloud services have extra resources on hand, you can typically upgrade and make alterations to your services with one small phone call if you need to. There will be no need to wait for more hard drives to arrive at the office or for new servers to be racked in a data center. Put in a request for more storage space, and you’ll usually get it on the same day – maybe even instantly. This is a far more convenient procedure than firms with legacy systems and on-site hardware have to go through. As such, the scalability provided by cloud solutions is simply too valuable to pass up, especially if you manage a business that is scaling rapidly.
Furthermore, since your organization has a fixed amount of resources to split among all of its obligations, you won’t be able to give maximal focus towards achieving business objectives and meeting consumers’ demands if you continually dedicate resources to infrastructure management, IT, and data storage concerns. Fortunately, cloud services solve this problem by allowing you to outsource all of your IT hosting, infrastructure, and maintenance responsibilities, giving you more time to focus on the aspects of your business operations that have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Reduces costs
As we’ve mentioned numerous times in this post, cloud computing solutions are a fantastic method to save expenses throughout your business. To begin with, the cost of running internal servers consumes a significant amount of energy, and that’s before factoring in the major initial expenses of deploying on-site servers. These costs are practically eliminated while using the cloud because the host pays the costs of server administration. Therefore, the cost of utilizing a server is considerably lower with a cloud service provider than it would be with your own internal system.
Second, the majority of cloud providers only charge you for the services you use, because as it turns out, most cloud-computing services are pay-as-you-go. If you don’t use the cloud services you signed up for, you won’t have to worry about being stuck with them for the foreseeable future, as you can easily cancel or change your service until you find the right balance. The pay-as-you-go method also applies to the data storage space required to serve your customers. This means that you will only ever have to pay for what you use, and you won’t be charged for what you don’t.
Last but not least, the cloud enables businesses to significantly decrease the requirement for full-time IT employees and, in some circumstances, eliminate payroll costs entirely. Savings can be realized nearly immediately since cloud services can be integrated without the need for any complex installations.
Final Word
Cloud computing is now a proven, mainstream solution that enables organizations to vastly improve a wide variety of business processes and operations without the need for costly installations and maintenance. Now, even small to medium-sized businesses have the ability to benefit from the advantages of cloud services, allowing them to deploy complicated data storage solutions such as data warehouses and data lakes – something that would have been far too costly to implement just a few years ago.
Also Read: The Cloudways Review: Which is the best managed Cloud Hosting?
