“Cloud computing is completely changing the UK business landscape” said former Dragon James Caan last week.
As Mr Caan points out, the beauty of the cloud is its affordability. In fact when his IT team suggested switching to the cloud, Caan was pleasantly surprised with the cost.
Start-ups in particular get immediate cost saving benefits from the cloud. Buying in-house servers and employing IT experts to maintain them is an expense small businesses could well do without. And thanks to the cloud, they can.
James Caan explains that cloud computing’s pay as you grow business model means that you now need a lot less money to launch a small enterprise. We live in a mobile world and it’s only right that businesses should be able to access their data wherever in the world they happen to be. Information is stored in the cloud and can be accessed in minutes.
Even the UK government is taking to the cloud. The Chancellor recently announced that more than 50% of government IT spending will move to the G-Cloud by 2015. According to a survey from EMC, the cloud could create 2.4 million jobs in Europe in the next four years. At a time of high unemployment, that news might encourage the government to actively promote the cloud as an alternative to in-house computing systems.
Virgin Media Business recently surveyed 5,000 UK firms. Two thirds of them said technology was vital to their company’s success and 32% said the most valued aspect of technology is cloud computing.
Cloud providers now need to live up to that accolade and provide greater transparency on the issue that most concerns businesses; that of data security. Caan suggests creating a hybrid whereby the most sensitive data is stored on your own network and the cloud is used for storage and backup. And that makes sense, after all nobody would pass over their most sensitive information to someone else without at least keeping a copy themselves.
The cloud is there to be used and since most providers work on the pay as you grow basis, it’s up to you how much, or how little you utilise their services.
How has the cloud changed the way you do business? How much of your business information do you entrust to the cloud?
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