The new year has brought in a ray of hope in the form of good news on COVID-19 vaccinations front. Experts predict that the world will need one to four years for the demand for services to return to pre-COVID levels. Multiple businesses were either forced to shut down or had to shift to a work from home approach. The sudden nature of these challenges caught a majority of businesses off-guard. This is where the cloud services stepped in, enabling companies to continue their work while keeping their employees safe during the pandemic.
Businesses were looking for ways to adapt to the changing global scenario, and cloud provided them with the means to do so. The world has witnessed wide adoption of cloud services in recent years, but this growth skyrocketed during the pandemic. Most small and medium businesses had to bear the brunt of COVID-19, impacting their daily business-critical workloads, and they turned to cloud tech solutions.
Even the businesses that adopted the cloud as a workaround to deal with the global pandemic, once on the cloud, started noticing the cloud advantages they had never thought over twice. With the help of cloud, even small businesses were able to tackle huge challenges. So, let’s take a look at what benefits have cloud services delivered to businesses.
Scaling and Flexibility
Small and medium companies have fluctuating demands, and it is not always possible for them to opt for the entire portfolio of services without severe strain on their entire budget. Cloud allows users to flexibly scale the services opted, bandwidth, and even processing power during a spike and then downscaling when peak subsides.
Cost-Savings
Traditional servers posed a challenge for the businesses of building and maintaining entire systems from the grounds up. These systems came with a lock-in, and upgrading them came with a huge price tag. Apart from the upgrade, the servers’ maintenance included multiple facilities like power, physical security, space, air-conditioning to keep the servers from overheating, and much more. Businesses have been able to avoid all these expenses with cloud services. Cloud has allowed users to opt for services instead of managing or building entire structures. Talking about upgrades, it is now up to the cloud service providers to always keep their systems updated to remain competitive in the market.
Availability
It is imperative that businesses ensure complete uptime and proper working of their applications. The reliance on services powering these increases many-fold and even a small downtime can prove disastrous. On-premise servers, like any other form of localized technology, are prone to a plethora of dangers such as, data loss during natural disasters. Cloud service providers bypass the majority of such issues while introducing many services to their portfolio. Data back-up is an up and comer in this field and ensures no organization ever loses its data, no matter what the scenario. Cloud environment guarantees maximum uptime with consistent and reliable performance.
Performance
In order to stay ahead of the competition, cloud service providers constantly update their services and hardware to provide their users with state-of-the-art solutions. Hence, cloud users can rest assured that they have access to the latest cutting-edge technology available in the market. On top of it, this performance is always scalable, so users never have to worry about running out of performance, cloud services have them covered.
Security
While cloud is secure, even cloud services are prone to many attacks ranging from viruses to ransomware. To tackle this hurdle, providers have put multiple security measures in place so that your data is always safe. With intrusion systems and sophisticated technology in place, threats are often isolated before causing any major havoc.
Conclusion
Cloud services have enabled organizations to continue their operations even through the pandemic. Experts opine that cloud is the logical and optimum solution to digitally transform an organization and get future-ready. The pandemic has not subsided, the world has a long way full of hurdles ahead of it. Businesses need to maintain continuity without losing revenue streams, the cloud has provided the business world ways to ensure just that.
The aforementioned benefits have allowed businesses to not just survive, but in some cases, even thrive during these trying times without hampering asset creation and efficiency. To be precise, while businesses will have to strap themselves up on their journey to a more stable and profitable future, cloud services will be the critical addition to their arsenal in recovering from this pandemic.