The meteoric growth of cloud storage over the past decade affected every business industry. Starting with the most tech-forward companies, it’s expanded to medium sized businesses, and all the way to mom and pop shops. The question is no longer, do you use cloud storage, it’s what cloud storage do you use?
Prior to the growth of online and cloud storage, there were numerous ways to physically store your documents, from a filing cabinet in your office to an offsite document storage facility. Those still exist, and certainly have their uses. But now cloud storage plays an important role in many businesses’ data storage plans.
However, there was no silver bullet to the growth of cloud storage. Its now stable place in business came from a multitude of factors.
Reduced Hardware Costs
One of the most expensive parts of running a business is the computer hardware and IT support it takes to install and maintain your systems. At its inception, the costs of cloud storage roved untenable for many businesses. As the technology improved and grew, it turned into an affordable to centralize, store, or back up documents and data.
As the price continued to drop, it quickly overtook internal servers as the affordable option for data storage. Instead of the hefty cost of paying a team and server costs, you could purchase a subscription to a cloud provider for a fraction of the cost.
The cost is variable depending on the capacity and the requirements that your business requires, but the per-user cost is almost always more competitive than the alternatives.
Accessibility
In the modern business world, speed and accessibility are key. Business moves at an increasingly fast pace. Searching a physical document storage location takes time. Many of the customers of today want a solution or product immediately, and if you can’t provide that, they’ll find a competitor who can.
The cloud enables employees to access the data or documents they need from any location with internet access. It helps them do their job, and ensures that customers receiver their products or purchases as soon as they want them.
Scalability
When you use the cloud for you’re business, you don’t have limitations on the number of users you can add. This may not be the case when it comes to old-school network infrastructure. Although there might be a per-user cost to add new employees to the service, it usually is a lot cheaper than the IT support to add a user to your existing network alone.
In addition to user flexibility, you also have the ability to add capacity for a minimal price increase. Adding email addresses, online storage, file sharing and more is not only cost effective, it’s usually easy to implement. There’s no more 5 day waiting period for IT to get your new employee access to their emails.
Security and Protection from Natural Disasters
Security remains one of the biggest questions surrounding cloud services. Is it really as secure as the cloud service management companies claim? Well, in their defense, no business can claim 100% secure. Data breaches existed before cloud services, and they’ll continue to exist in whatever follows the cloud. However, cloud security has improved leaps and bounds since its first iterations. And cloud service providers can’t bear the brunt of security alone. Just like with physical storage solutions, you can take steps to protect your business when you use cloud services.
All cloud services nowadays provide powerful encryption from the second you sign into the system. All your documents should be protected when you transfer them, access them, and even when you download them.
You also have the ability to grant clearance levels depending on the confidentiality of the documents in your system. That way, you can eliminate the risk of unauthorized personnel accessing documents they shouldn’t.
Reliability
Barring a power outage or natural disaster where your servers are located, your cloud service is almost always available. Your can back up your data at intervals you select, rather than whenever you can make it to your storage space. In addition, the data is mirrored at multiple data centers to further guarantee the integrity of the data so that it is very difficult to have a catastrophic or complete data loss.
In essence, your data is backed up, stored off-site, easy to access, and very rarely unavailable.
Record Nations Can Help You Find a Cloud Storage Solution
Overall, cloud document services are here to stay, and are becoming mainstream in document management. The more you understand it, the more trust you’ll put in it. If you have any questions, Record Nations can help!
We will connect you with cloud storage professionals that can walk you through the process of selecting a cloud storage company. Fill out the form on the page, or give us a call today at (866) 385-3706 for a free, no-obligations consultation on your cloud storage needs.
