In the game of business, seizing a competitive advantage is a time-tested path toward winning! The bottom line with cloud storage: it gives the leadership and employees of any type of business the tools they need improve productivity, decrease costs, and serve their customers better. In an ever-more competitive world, who couldn’t use that?
Cloud Storage Enables Your Team To Get Out There and Do Stuff—Without Sacrificing Productivity or Connectivity
Cloud storage enables secure access to corporate data via smartphones, laptops, and other mobile devices. For workers with busy schedules—or who work in remote areas—having their business-critical apps available on the go helps them save time, work efficiently, and keep up-to-date with clients, co-workers, and managers. Through the cloud, you can keep your traveling sales staff, freelance employees, or workers on remote job sites all seamlessly connected to the rest of the organization. Companies that take advantage of cloud services also report an increase in employee satisfaction, which helps them retain quality workers.
Cloud Storage Enables Your IT Staff to Remain Focused on Business Goals Instead of System Maintenance and Troubleshooting
Your business has limited resources to juggle all of its responsibilities. If your current IT solutions are forcing you to commit too much of your attention to computer and data-storage issues, your IT team will be unable to allocate their time to reaching business goals and satisfying customers.
Cloud-based systems offer businesses more flexibility overall, compared to hosting on a local server. If extra bandwidth is needed, a cloud-based infrastructure can meet that demand instantly—without a complex and expensive upgrade to your IT systems. With the cloud, you’ll be positioned to weather fluctuations in business cycles and gain a cost advantage with variable production schedules.
The Cloud Will Cut Your IT Costs Across the Board
For those who are worried that they’ll end up paying a premium price for features that they neither need nor 
want, fear not! The features and functionality of a cloud computing platform are typically on-demand or pay-as-you-go. This means if you don’t take advantage of what your particular cloud service offers, you can scale down your cloud services to provide only the things you need.
Some of the most common cloud-computing services include:
- Infrastructure-as-a-service
- Private, public or hybrid data storage
- Desktop and mobile apps
- Big data analytics
- Disaster recovery and backup data in the cloud
The pay-as-you-go system also applies to the data storage space needed to service your clients. By controlling the amount of space you need, or what applications you use, you’ll be able to develop a cost leadership strategy, run a more efficient IT department, and gain a competitive advantage.
By taking advantage of cloud computing, businesses are free from having to constantly update and maintain their software and systems, while still having the processing power of a vast enterprise IT infrastructure. Cloud-based applications automatically refresh and update themselves. The alternative would be your IT department taking time out of the important work they’re doing for your business to perform a manual update…which could then result in related hardware issues (as is often the case).
Many organizations have security concerns when it comes to adopting a cloud-computing solution. Since files, programs, and other data aren’t kept securely onsite, they may think it’s risky to rely on others to protect valuable information.
However, an integral part of a cloud host’s business model is providing always-updated, enterprise-level cyber security and data protections. While most businesses don’t like to openly consider the possibility of internal data theft, the truth is that a staggeringly high percentage of data thefts occur internally and are perpetrated by employees. When this is the case, it can actually be much safer to keep sensitive information offsite.
The Cloud Lets You Operate in a More Environmentally Friendly and Sustainable Way
It’s no longer enough for organizations to place a recycling bin in the break-room and claim they’re doing their part to help the planet. Real sustainability requires solutions that address wastefulness at every level of a business. By using the cloud, businesses consume fewer servers and use less electricity to run their operations. As a result, hosting on the cloud results in less of a carbon footprint, and is, therefore, more environmentally friendly.
Talk to Us—Imaging Office Systems—Today!
At Imaging Office Systems, we are focused on improving your information management, and ensuring that you gain a sustainable competitive advantage with cloud storage services. We believe that the smarter you are with your information, the better you can serve your customers. Let us help you save time, improve efficiency, and change the way you do business for the better!