Cloud Technology
What is the “Cloud”? How does it work? …How can businesses sort through all the hype and figure out how their business can really benefit? …That’s where we can assist!
Cloud services enable companies to utilize a wide variety of shared applications and resources as a utility just like electricity. Rather than having to build, manage and maintain computing and network infrastructures in-house, clients can lease shared resources from their cloud provider. These services are hosted and accessed remotely, or in the provider’s “cloud”, and are delivered via the client’s Internet or private Data/WAN connection. There are many business benefits to utilizing cloud services:
- Opex vs. Capex: Businesses can lease, or rent, and operationally expense their cloud service infrastructure from their provider avoiding the need for large initial capital expenses to develop and manage an in-house infrastructure all of which will likely be obsolete in a couple years.
- Obsolescence Avoidance or Future Proofing: With many cloud services, licensing and feature upgrades are constant and are included in the monthly or annual service fees. Onsite managed equipment can be replaced immediately in the event that equipment fails, which is included in the managed service fee as well. In a constantly evolving technology environment, this consideration is more desirable versus building and managing your own in-house infrastructure.
- Flexibility: Cloud services offer the flexibility to change providers and/or service platforms on a more frequent basis as the needs of the business change. So, at the end of your service term, a business client can choose to stay with the existing provider or change to another that may offer more features or functionality.
- On-Demand Provisioning: End users can quickly and easily turn up applications and resources for almost any type of workload as needed.
- Pay per Use and Elasticity: Cloud resources are measured at a user, or seat, level allowing customers to pay only for the resources and workloads they use. Companies can scale up as needs increase and then scale down again as demands decrease.
- Faster, More Efficient Troubleshooting, Change Orders and Service Support: With many cloud applications, supporting a client’s changing needs becomes a matter of changing software preferences via your web based administrative interface or login. Services can be managed and supported more easily and efficiently across geographic regions and from anywhere the account Administrator has access to the Internet.
- Disaster Recovery & Redundancy: Businesses can leverage the resources and scale of their cloud provider to prevent downtime due to outages of any nature, including those related to power or weather at their local place of business. For example, a power outage will close the office but the business can still be operational with remote, or virtual, users that access their cloud applications from any other location that has Internet access minimizing or eliminating the effect of the downtime on the business.
Guardian Tech Partners offers industry leading cloud providers who assist businesses in designing, implementing and managing their cloud services. Cloud services can be private, public or hybrid, please contact us to learn more. For all the reasons listed above combined with improvements in the cloud technologies available today, Internet bandwidth availability and data network capacity, more and more businesses are moving to cloud services like the following:
- Hosted PBX & Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)
- Mobility And Collaboration Services
- Cloud Contact Center
- Backup and Disaster Recovery
- Data Centers & Colocation
- Hosted Security / Security as a Service (SaaS)
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS)