We have been asked by many of our customers about Cloud Computing. What is “Cloud Computing”, and how it can benefit their business? The underlying aim is to somehow reduce business IT costs by transferring daily computing tasks to the Internet. To use free or lower cost services to run their business.

Looking at the downside of cloud computing, many services seem to be free or low cost services, offering savings too good to be true. Of course, if a business does not make money, it will close, and with the closure comes the loss of your company’s data. Recovering from data loss of any kind is extremely expensive and would remove any savings made by using these services.

Above all, there will no gains for a business if there connectivity to the internet is not reliable.

So, if the cloud is full of risk, why is “Cloud Computing” such a buzz term offering productivity and cost benefits?

A business needs a more secure environment – an internal cloud. An environment accessible only by your own trusted employees when they away from the office, needing company information to keep them productive.

A safe internal cloud/environment can offer the following productivity benefits.

Email – Access your email from anywhere, either using a mobile phone or by logging onto your mail server using a secure connection from any computer connected to the internet.

Documents – Synchronise your documents to a secure website, so you can access from anywhere to make changes or to present from any location. Collaborate with employees and contributors in one master document to quickly produce reports and action plans, knowing that the document will synchronise back to your company server for back-up and availability in the office.

IP Telephony – Integrate your company phone system into your mobile phone, or configure a softphone on a laptop computer. Gain call cost savings and seamless availability to your customers from your office number.

Back-up – If you don’t have multiply copies of a file, then you have no back-up. Implement an online back-up schedule into your back-up procedure and ensure you have access to your files to restore from any location.

Desktop Access – Use Virtual Private Networks (VPN’s) to access a computer in the office from a remote location.

And the best thing of all about all the above productivity savings is that they have already been purchased or require only a small licence fee to deploy.

So to enjoy the real business benefits of cloud computing, with traditional business programs you know and trust, talk to Unitec IT Solutions today to implement these solutions and become more productive throughout the day, no matter where you are.

This article was created for Unitec IT Solutions and republished with their permisson.