What are cloud services?
In the past, a typical business organisation would have all their servers, software application programs and data installed on local premises.
Such an arrangement would require a secure server location, and the need to maintain and support the local hardware, ensure local backups, to provide resilience in the case of fail over, and to plan for future growth capacity of both software and data. Now, in many cases, the same organisation can rent the right amount of space and application programs on very large and highly efficient servers housed in secure data centres located around the world. These data centres run all or part of the company’s programs and store the resultant data, normally replicating this data between two such data centres so that you know you always have backup and resilience.
Access and updates to this data is achieved using a secure broadband connection, which, as only data changes are being transmitted, does not necessarily need to be especially fast or large. So, by centralising your hardware, software and data storage to a remote server, cloud services become very efficient in the case of disaster resilience, in local power usage, and can also be said to be “environmentally friendly” compared to past methods. At Care Micro we believe that it is inevitable that a very large proportion of the worlds’ computing power and data will be housed in these secure data centres, built, run and maintained by global players such as Microsoft and Google.
Indeed UK cloud adoption has grown from 48% of companies having any hosted or cloud based services in 2010, to 84% in 2015.
Tangible benefits achieved from cloud services deployment include:
1. More flexible access to technology
2. Faster access to technology
3. Cost saving over on premise solutions
4. Reduction in capital expenditure
5. On-demand/predicable revenue costs
Already Care Micro has helped a significant number of our customers to migrate their key services to cloud-based functions. If you would like to learn more about how moving to the Cloud can help your business organisation, please contact Care Micro.