The emerging trend of Cloud-based services is becoming more and more prominent each day. 

So what do Cloud services mean?

In simple words any service provided via the internet, by the service provider, be it access to the applications, resources or storage, all come under the umbrella of Cloud services.
We can categorize the Cloud services as shown in the image below:

Service providers like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Google have ventured in providing Cloud based services – Microsoft has a Microsoft Azure partner ecosystem to support Azure hosting. The rapid growth of Cloud services opens up a vast field of opportunities for the application providers of conventional applications like ERP, CRM, ECM solutions. In fact, many of these have already started reaping its benefits by hosting services on Cloud.

Why switch to Cloud services?

The Cloud-based services give us the leverage to pay on monthly basis, the way our telecom service provider bills us for mobile usage, without having to incur heavy upfront costs.

The following facts will make it more convincing as to why I would switch to Cloud services:

1. Flexibility to scale up 
Cloud-based services are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating resources/bandwidth demands. One can easily scale up or scale down the capacity/services. This level of agility gives a real advantage over competitors.

2. How Secure is it?
One of the most important question (from middle management to upper management) asked when opting for Cloud services is that the data on the Cloud is not secure enough. Trust, this is a myth! Studies have proven that the number of security breach on the servers/applications hosted on private data centers has been much higher than those hosted on Cloud services. 
As a matter of fact, these Cloud service providers have most of the certifications required to give a sense of confidence that the data lying in the remote server is much secure than where we have stored right now.

3. Easy solution for Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery costs a huge amount to the businesses and very few businesses/organizations could afford for a robust disaster recovery solution/system. With Cloud DR services, smaller organizations are finding it easier to adopt better DR practices avoiding large upfront investment and roll up third-party expertise.

4. Automatic Software updates
The beauty of the ‘Cloud’ is that the service providers take care of the servers and rollout regular software updates (including security updates) saving the worry and time for server maintenance.

5. Increased Performance and collaboration
Teams can access, edit and share documents anytime, from anywhere, increasing their efficiency of doing the work together, and do it better. Cloud-based workflow and file sharing apps help them in making the updates in real time and give them full visibility of their collaborations.

6. Work from anywhere
Cloud computing gives comfort to work from anywhere. If a person has an internet connection he can be at work. And with most serious Cloud services offering mobile apps, there is no restriction with the device one uses. This gives businesses the leverage to offer more flexible working perks to employees so they can enjoy the work-life balance that suits them.

7. Document control

When you shift to Cloud computing, all the files are stored centrally making it accessible to authorized users. Greater accessibility leads to improved collaboration and less requirement of monitoring which ultimately means better work at the bottom line.

Microsoft Azure is the growing collection of integrated Cloud services offered by Microsoft – trusted worldwide by businesses/organizations to host their Business applications (be it ERP, CRM, any others). The global network of datacenters provides the flexibility to host the business application in the geography of their choice. You also get a strong ecosystem of Microsoft Azure partners, many of whom are also Azure certified partners – providing end to end Azure hosting services.

Still in dilemma?

To know more Azure certified partners visit  Alletec’s Azure page