How Cloud Helps Improve Organization's Productivity

Cloud computing has evolved from a mere trend in the software development space into a necessity, for organizations to achieve higher productivity and efficiency.  In business, productivity is to attain more with less. Organization’s productivity and growth depends both on technological innovation and on the process changes that are aiming optimization. High productivity is among the main benefits of cloud computing. Cloud has the potential to significantly reduce costs, increase security, enhance collaboration, agility and control as resources are in remote data centers, or the “cloud.” According to the study conducted by Emergent Research, 78 percent of small businesses (companies with less than 50 employees) will be fully adapted to the cloud by 2020 — up from 37 percent in 2014.

From a hardware provisioning, pricing, security and management point of view, here are the aspects of cloud computing that helps enhance an organization’s productivity.

Cost Savings: Cloud computing is often described as a methodology to convert capital expenses into operating expenses due to its built-in flexibility and pay-as-you-use model. It provides resources on demand and quickly enough to follow load surges to adapt to changing business needs. As a result, organizations pay for what they use, eliminating the need for long-term resource provisioning. Cloud prevents organizations from overspending on services that they do not fully use and thus optimizes the IT budget distribution. With cloud, organizations can reduce the costs for infrastructure needed to support their own data center. Moreover, staffing budget is also optimized, as IT professionals do not need to spend time and efforts for data maintenance and security, which is taken care of by the cloud providers. Thus, decrease in energy cost, network bandwidth, software development, and hardware infrastructure and management costs are the key advantages of cloud computing that significantly reduces IT costs.

Security: Cloud computing provides additional layer of security to organization’s data. Security implemented by cloud providers help block threats that are going undetected by businesses’ current security systems. The greatest asset of an organization is its data. Cloud computing guarantees safe storage of data.  With cloud, data and documents are being well protected against malicious attacks or cyber threats.  This is because cloud vendors have constructed and maintained specially designed secure infrastructure and specialized teams that are trained to deal with security issues. Moreover, cloud service providers physically secure the equipment such as servers, routers, etc. against third party malicious interference, unauthorized access and damages caused by natural disasters. This leads to better security as compared to organizations on premise infrastructure. Cloud applications are offered through professionally designed and managed data centers, where better monitoring and security resources are ensured in comparison to those in any organization. Using cloud computing, businesses do not need to worry about physical limitations such as insufficient space or potential loss of data. Cloud guarantees data backup and security, which minimizes the risk of disruptions and thus increases organization’s productivity.

Collaboration/Sharing: One of the main advantages of cloud computing is its converged infrastructure that results in maximizing the effectiveness of shared resources. Team members are able to create, edit and share documents and work together on the same project simultaneously in real time. Users do not need to install special software and applications on their devices and thus they can access work documents from any computer, anywhere around the world. Employees can easily update and manage data, work on a variety of different type of documents and use the applications on the cloud. Team members can share their work faster with their colleagues across the world, overcoming the traditional restrictions of geographical distances and time zone differences. Thus, better collaboration enabled by cloud leads to improved productivity.

Anywhere Access: Cloud computing not only allows the resources to be shared by multiple users but also enables dynamic resource reallocation, when required. In cloud, all the data is stored on one location and synchronized with all available devices. Multiple users can access a single server to retrieve and update their data. Team members can manage documents from their tablets, laptops, mobile phones, or any other devices. Moreover, users can save and store all types of documents on their devices. It means that with cloud computing, co-workers can collaborate in a better way that improves the speed of work speed and enables better collaboration that leads to higher productivity.

Cloud computing is witnessing ever increasing growth as it is being adopted by organizations large and small across industry verticals. More businesses are migrating their data to the cloud, by moving away from the traditional storage technology. Thus, operating as a global network of services in the Internet infrastructure, cloud computing is an important paradigm, that help organizations gain higher productivity as team members can collaborate from anywhere, have enterprise-grade security and can easily meet dynamic scalability needs.