Sixty-five percent of global small- and medium-sized businesses and 93 percent of U.S. businesses now use cloud-based storage as a safeguard for remote location disaster recovery, according to International Data Corporation research. Cloud storage use will grow dramatically in the next few years, with MarketsandMarkets projecting a compound annual growth rate of 28.2 percent between 2015 and 2020. Some analysts expect growth as high as 33 percent, according to Nasuni. Chances are your competition is already using cloud storage, and if not, they will be soon. If your company is still lagging behind cloud storage adoption, here are a few reasons you can give your boss that make moving your files to the cloud worth your while.
Cost
Money talks, and the best argument for moving to cloud storage is the cost savings. Because cloud storage is hosted on remote servers, your company doesn’t have to bear the brunt of buying and managing your own equipment. Instead you pay for renting space on your host’s servers. Your storage fees are scaled to actual use, so you don’t pay for space you’re not using. Together these factors make cloud storage exceptionally inexpensive. For instance, Zip Cloud offers unlimited storage space for only $4.95 a month. Compare this to the cost of running your own data center, and it’s not hard to see how cloud storage saves you money.
Mobile Accessibility
Twenty-three percent of Americans now do some or all of their work from home, an increase from 19 percent in 2003, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. With more companies using remote workers, providing employees with remote access to files is becoming an operational necessity for many businesses. Newmind Group CEO Matthew Volmar says online storage provides a solution to this need by enabling employees to work from anywhere. Cloud storage services also sync stored files with your employees’ devices, ensuring that your whole team is on the same page with the latest file version updates.
Security
Many companies are hesitant to move to the cloud because the prospect of moving data off-site makes them feel less secure. But Cloud Computing Visionary CEO David Linthicum, author of 13 books on computers, says the public cloud is actually more secure than private data centers. Cloud providers employ full-time security specialists whose sole job is to protect client data, whereas company IT employees typically handle security as one task among many. Cloud providers follow industry best practices and stay up-to-date on the latest security issues and updates, and are normally alerted to problems long before enterprise IT departments. Linthicum says hackers know this and rather than attacking cloud providers, they tend to target on-premise servers as easier prey, as the recent Hilton Hotel chain data breach illustrates.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Backup and disaster recovery are two more good reasons to store your data on the cloud. The cloud has changed the data backup industry, Carbonite channel director David Hauser says, by making it possible for small businesses to afford simple, automatic backup of unlimited amounts of data. Cloud backup also provides a superior preventive safeguard in the event disaster recovery is needed. As Online Tech explains, cloud backups use virtualization, where your company’s entire server, including your operating systems, software and data, can be stored on a single software bundle or virtual server. This makes data backed up on the cloud independent of your hardware, so even if a disaster compromises your on-site physical hardware, your data is unaffected. Cloud servers also back up your data at multiple locations, ensuring that there is no one point of vulnerability that can threaten your data. These factors make cloud backup a better disaster recovery solution than on-premise data backup.
