Business culture continues to evolve. Whereas once business was all about paperwork and filing, computers arrived and allowed digital copies to be saved. From there, programs were created to help people with their day to day work and operations. Finally, the cloud arrived, and suddenly, there was no need for physical servers.
Cloud services allow people to run programs and store data online without the need to pay for their own expensive server systems. The cloud continues to evolve as well. The services offered now seem to push towards task automation. Through proper use of cloud services, a company will find that their efficiency increases. When efficiency increases, it’s only a matter of time until profits do as well.
Automated Cloud Services
There are different services which get automated online. Each of these subsections of services works to provide cloud services and automate them as well as possible.
- Recovery as a service - Many businesses need to protect their data. Automated recovery services will consistently back up data and business solutions. This automated service serves as a hedge against disaster and can be vital to a company if the worst happens.
- Software as a service - This is where the vast majority or automation can come into play. Software as a cloud service will provide varying services including ERP, CRM, project management and web conferencing. These software offerings will often save a lot of time, and the way they are mingled together in the cloud allows benefits.
- Infrastructure as a service - This tends to be an overarching type of cloud service. Essentially, it fully outsources the hardware and often software needed to run a business. This can fully include development platforms or web hosting.
- Platform as a service - This service is pretty similar to infrastructure, but takes things a step further. This is typically picked up by people who are creating their applications for the web or cloud and need a safe test environment.
Popular Vendors
When it comes to automating cloud services, there a few big names which tend to be the first off of anyone’s lips. These offer large enterprise levels of cloud services, but can also be scaled down to fit smaller businesses as well.
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google offer incredible cloud services. There are plenty of other providers as well. Verizon, Rackspace Cloud Servers and IBM also provide infrastructure as a service to people who wish to use it.
Frequently Asked Questions
The cloud can be a confusing place. There’s a lot of misunderstanding on just what cloud computing and cloud services are. Hopefully some of these questions and answers can assist in your knowledge gatherings.
Q: Does every company need cloud services?
A: The truth is that not every company needs cloud services. However, that number continues to get smaller and smaller. It’s hard to not find some sort of benefit almost any company can find in the cloud, even if it’s just an automated CRM service.
Q: What’s the easiest workload to move to the cloud?
A: by far the easiest is your disaster and data recovery. This service simply backs up your data and protects it. In the case of hackers or environmental disaster, the data can quickly and safely be restored.
Q: Are cloud services safe?
A: Security is important. The good news is that cloud services are also obsessed with security. Enterprise level security is available in cloud services to companies which would otherwise have to set up their own security.
