Increasing globalization makes it necessary for companies to evolve in order to keep up with progress. In this context, there is the cooperative work of many employees of a company - or even of several employees - on a common project. The Internet has made such collaboration possible for decades. However, while in the past data exchange was limited to e-mail attachments of a very limited size, with technological advances companies have been able to build extensive server systems. However, these have certain weaknesses, making them uneconomical for the vast majority of companies. The trend has therefore been towards outsourcing to providers of cloud services for years. If you are also looking for a modern solution for your company, then you should take a closer look at the advantages of a cloud compared to an in-house server system in this article.
The advantages of a cloud
At first glance, a cloud appears to be little different than servers in your own company. In fact, the cloud still seems to have the disadvantage that you have to entrust your valuable data to a third-party company. A closer look reveals many differences that speak in favor of the cloud.
The first point here is plasticity. If you set up your own server, then you have the problem of choosing the right scope. If you only set up a few servers, it can quickly happen that the capacities are exhausted and you have to expand the system. If this happens over a long period of time, you will eventually reach the point where the latest hardware is not compatible with the oldest and you will have to replace the entire system. In the opposite case, you can set up an extensive system directly, the performance of which you will only be able to fully exploit in years. Until then, the idle system still causes high operating and maintenance costs and as soon as you actually use it fully, the hardware is long outdated and has to be completely replaced anyway.
If, on the other hand, you use an independent cloud service, then you give up all this responsibility. Your expenses are then limited to the fees for the services that you actually use. The plasticity of the cloud is once again clearly shown here. You can add and deduct individual services as you need them, so you only pay for what you actually need and always stay up to date with the latest technology.
The efficiency of a cloud solution also far exceeds that of in-house servers. Either your own IT specialists are required for maintenance or you need an external company. The infrastructure to set up an air-conditioned server room also causes not inconsiderable costs and the air-conditioning is then still significantly less efficient than in special server farms. With a cloud, these problems also disappear for you and are ticked off with the fees for the service.
However, the greatest advantages of the cloud are not the significantly reduced effort compared to maintaining your own server system, but the diverse possibilities that the cloud offers you and your company. Of course, the top priority here is global, unrestricted access to all content in the cloud, which is only possible with our own servers if they are also connected to the Internet. Otherwise, only local access is possible. Another advantage is the high reliability and security of the cloud. While a small company relies on the work of an IT specialist who may not be available at weekends in the event of a fault, troubleshooting is one of the tasks that cloud providers take care of as quickly as possible around the clock, 365 days a year become.
This also includes security. A company with its own servers not only has to keep the hardware but also the software up to date in order to protect itself against accidental data loss and against external and - as surprising as this may sound - internal hacker attacks. With a cloud provider, however, such work is not an additional task, but an essential part of the core competencies and services. Although there is no such thing as absolute security, your company's data is much more secure on a cloud server than on an inadequately maintained company-internal server.
A final, significant benefit of the cloud is versatility. Anyone who thinks that the cloud is just an outsourced data store is very wrong. Since it very fast hard disks with extraordinarily high storage capacities out, the aspect of storage expansion through the cloud has become an almost irrelevant extra. The greatest advantages are that countless people from your own company or even from an external company can access all or selected data - worldwide from any Internet-enabled device. The main aspect here is that fully functional programs can also be installed in the cloud and shared by all authorized persons. For example, just the e-mail services can be outsourced, CRM systems can be set up, for example, which can be used for smoother maintenance of customer relationships, or an ERP network, such as JTL Wawi in the cloud be created, which enables a very direct link between suppliers, producers and customers. This close connection finally allows several companies to find out about the current processes at their partners at any time and from any location and to adapt their own operational processes to the prevailing situation at the time. In this way, both bottlenecks and unused capacities are reduced to an absolute minimum.
Disadvantages of the cloud
No system in the world has only advantages - not even the cloud. Above all, a fast broadband Internet connection is required for smooth use. While access to local servers is always possible, disruptions to the internet connection make it impossible to use the cloud. After all, this applies to almost all work processes in a company anyway.
