It’s no surprise that the cloud has become a not-so-secret weapon for many organizations, yielding the potential for greater flexibility, higher productivity and decreased upfront investment and cost. For many years, a lot of businesses held out on using the cloud for security reasons and other concerns. However, recent data shows that cloud use is increasing. According to RightScale’s fifth annual State of the Cloud survey, hybrid cloud usage increased from 58% in 2015 to 71% in 2016. Not only that, but 17% of enterprises also have more than a thousand VMs in the public cloud as compared with 13% in 2015.
For many, the phrase “cloud computing” is synonymous with “cloud storage,” and it’s understandable why that’s the case. The Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Usage report determined that cloud storage was the cloud app category with the highest number of apps. This category was also considered to be the riskiest. But the cloud is about a lot more than enterprise cloud storage.
Here are six other ways the cloud can be used by businesses:
1. Mobile workspace—The cloud gives any company the tools necessary to allow employees to work from anywhere. That’s because email and any important documents can be uploaded and saved to the cloud—so work can actually be accomplished in the cloud. File sharing is another huge reason why the cloud enables a mobile workspace. When your organization uses a hosted cloud environment, it has a place to upload large or sensitive files that you prefer not to send via email. Some cloud storage providers also make it easy to edit documents as a group (even simultaneously!) using familiar tools.
2. Email—The great thing about using the cloud to host your email is you can access it from anywhere. That’s especially important if your employees travel or work from home at all. Because email is considered a mission-critical application in today’s business world, it needs to be reliable. When you use the cloud (instead of hosting your own exchange server), gone are the worries about server uptime and email capacity.
Follow Microsoft 365