To understand what categorizes something as a cloud service, we first need to define what it really means to say that something is “in the cloud”. It can sound like a fairly abstract idea, but it’s actually very concrete.
Saying that an application is running on the cloud is simply saying that it is being hosted on an offsite server but is still available to you and your organization seamlessly on premise. For instance, all of the applications you have on your smartphone are not natively running on the device. They are living in a data center that is allowing you to access the application remotely.
So, how can utilizing cloud services benefit your business and furthermore, what services are available?
Benefits of Cloud Services
Signing up with a cloud services provider can be a huge plus for your business in a number of ways. It costs money to keep your data center, no matter how small it may be, up and running. Here are some of the issues that you can have with running your own servers:
- Power
- Cooling
- Maintenance
- Square footage
- System monitoring
By eliminating the number of applications you run onsite, you can dramatically decrease the associated costs with maintaining them yourself. This point is especially significant to consider if you’re a startup company and looking to make capital investments in your business. It’s quite possible that you could run everything off of a cloud server and not have to make any upfront, large ticket, investments on physical on-premises equipment.
Popular Cloud Services
Cloud services is really a catch all phrase for any service that is done in a cloud. Here are some types of cloud services that you can use for your business.
Telecommunications
As landlines are rapidly becoming an outdated technology, utilizing a telecommunications company which runs its computing services in the cloud is becoming the standard option. Every communications service your company utilizes is readily available through a telecom cloud services provider including email, voicemail, phone service, fax service, virtual meetings,etc.
Moving your telecommunications services to a dedicated provider not only frees up virtual space in your data center, but it will also come with managed services. So, if your email is on the fritz you don’t need to monopolize your in-house engineers to fix the issue.
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CRM
In order to keep your organization, well, organized, you very likely utilize a customer relationship management software. This is yet another service that would do you well to run from the cloud. Online services, such as SalesForce, enable you to fully customize your CRM while incorporating several departments like marketing and sales onto one streamlined platform.
Data Backup and Recovery
Disaster recovery can be the single most important consideration when planning your IT delivery model. Organizations, no matter their size, must prepare for the worst and what that means to each company is different. If your business generates the majority of its revenue through e-commerce, a short outage in your network could drastically effect your bottom line.
Enlisting a cloud services company to run your backup and recovery is always a safe bet because you don’t want all of your eggs in one basket. Keeping your information backed up and available in a separate data center, in the cloud, ensure that even if your building were to burn down tomorrow, your electronic data would still be safe and sound.
Looking for help with cloud services for your business? Beacon Telecom is happy to help—contact us today to get started on a cloud solution for your business.
