What Do People Use the Cloud for?

Perhaps more than any other modern technology, the cloud is most misunderstood. What is it? Where is it? What is it for? The cloud is just a term to describe a remote (usually virtualized) place to store and process data and run applications. You can, of course, find many various descriptions of the cloud, but if you boil them all down to the essence, that’s what it is. A cloud service provider offers these storage and processing capabilities via a service contract. Here are the most common business uses for the cloud.

Email Services

One of the first things businesses usually do to leverage the cloud is to migrate their email services. Keeping email servers in-house is an expensive, time-gobbling, and inefficient way of doing business when cloud email options are so much easier and cheaper. Moving email services to the cloud reduces the amount of equipment needed, personnel to maintain it, power to run it, etc.

Storage

Businesses must keep an enormous amount of data, including transactional data, customer data, tax records, information needed for regulatory compliance issues, and more. Without the cloud, these businesses must invest a significant amount of money and resources for equipment, personnel, facilities space, etc. to house the data. With the cloud, these businesses can simply transfer the data to cloud storage and pay a nominal monthly fee to keep it safe there.

Big Data Analysis

With all that data, companies can derive useful information to improve operations, drive business intelligence, create smarter means of marketing, and more. Big data analysis takes an enormous amount of storage space and processing power, which is expensive to do in-house. By migrating data to the cloud and running analysis with the power of the Full Metal Cloud, big data scientists can get much more done in a shorter period of time, without all of the infrastructure investments necessary to house and process many terabytes or petabytes of data. Here, big data scientists can take advantage of data analytics tools like Hadoop and NoSQL databases.

Backup & Disaster Recovery

It is an uncertain world. Aside from ordinary equipment failures (which happens to all businesses at some point), businesses have to be prepared for natural disasters, fires, and many other potential threats to the physical structures as well as the IT infrastructures necessary to their business operations. By backing up into the cloud, businesses can protect their data and operations from onsite server failures, damage from natural disasters, and other threats. The best part of the cloud is that even if onsite equipment is utterly destroyed, the business can set up virtually anywhere, retrieve their operations via cloud services, and be back in business in very little time.

These are the most common business uses, but there are many others. Some businesses turn to a cloud-based IT infrastructure (IaaS) to avoid the significant investments in onsite IT infrastructure. This allows startups and small businesses to get the technology necessary to compete with the big guys, without having to go into huge debt. The cloud is also useful for hosting company websites and leveraging the earning potential of e-commerce.

Would you like to see how it works? Try a demo of the BigStep Full Metal Cloud today.