The cloud makes life a little easier for individuals at home, but it has the potential to make life in the office easier too. Although the concept of storing information off-site is a fairly easy concept to understand, there are many more ways the cloud can be used to optimize your business operations.

Keep Things Secure

Keeping your data safe is extremely important. Not only can your employees’ personal information be compromised, your customers’ information can be compromised too. This can have a huge impact on your company’s reputation, and it has the potential to greatly decrease your bottom line.

Many companies did and still do rely on perimeter-based security, which means protecting company data from outside threats. However, threats can come from unlikely places too. Zero trust security is a more strategic way to approach a secure infrastructure because:

• It secures transactions between all users, devices, and networks

• Users are only given access to the information they need

• All access transactions are monitored and logged

This creates a lot of data, which is where the cloud comes in. In addition to other platform-as-a-service options, this type of security can be completely maintained in the cloud. There’s no need to download software or store the information it gathers on-site.

Storage

If you know anything about the cloud, you probably know that it is primarily used to store information. This can make life a lot easier when used for personal reasons. Keeping important documents and photos in the cloud means you don't have to take up space on your computer, and you don't have to try and manage piles of USB drives.

When it comes to business, storing information in the cloud is an especially good idea. Not only do you not have to deal with external storage devices, which means transferring data on a regular basis, it can actually affect other areas of your business. When all of your data is stored elsewhere, you'll notice greater operating speeds, and it gives you the ability to scale quickly. With virtualized pools of storage, you're able to store information according to your specific requirements, then forget about it until you need it.

Data Recovery

Things happen, no matter how secure you think data is. Malware can damage data so it’s unusable, viruses can force you to reset your systems, and hardware failures may mean you aren’t able to retrieve your data at all. There’s nothing scarier than realizing your information is lost forever, but it’s also really annoying to spend days or even weeks recovering data the old-fashioned way.

The cloud can help! With all data information stored in one place remotely, it can be accessed quickly, allowing for a faster recovery than relying on recovery extraction from hard drives. Recovery can be completed quickly, which means less downtime before your systems are operational again, and it means spending less money to retrieve your information.

Data Backup

There are many ways to back up your data. They include:

• Use an external hard drive

• Burn it to a CD or DVD

• Put it on a USB flash drive

• Save it to an on-site network-attached storage device

Of course, you can also use the cloud!

Traditional ways of backing up data are time consuming, because they require you to maintain tapes and drives, manually transferring data according to a schedule. Cloud backup enables you to do that all automatically with fewer chances of malfunctions and human errors.

Backing up entire operation systems is a lot easier with the cloud too. That way, you can reset your operating systems after a virus or another attack, then retrieve your data to get your systems back to normal.

Analyze Data

The cloud is most frequently used for data storage, backup, and retrieval, but there's even more potential in the way of big data analytics.

Analytical tools and techniques can help your company extract relevant data from huge stores of information. It can then be organized in ways that are easy to understand.

Any kind of data can be analyzed more accurately in less time. You can discover consumer buying patterns and adjust marketing accordingly, you can learn more about exactly how your business is spending money, and you can even learn things about employee activities at work. Because it’s so much easier than other methods of analyzing data, you may find yourself willing to analyze data that you thought would be too time consuming compared to its payoff.

Test and Develop

Testing and developing used to be quite a huge hassle. The testing environment needed to be set up using physical assets on-location which can eat up a lot of time and money. Once completed, you may keep it around or not, depending on whether or not you have the space and ability to store it.

Cloud computing means there's no need for physical hardware to set up an environment. It is all done on the cloud, which means storing those environments for future use is a lot easier too.

Hybrid Cloud

If you've got the whole cloud thing down and you're ready to take things to the next level, consider hybrid cloud computing. With this ability, you're able to unify multiple public and private cloud services. This enables you to orchestrate and manage them as if they are part of a single environment. You can choose the best cloud environment for every particular project, and that information can be moved between clouds quickly and easily.

In that same vein is the multicloud. This type of cloud enables you to combine clouds from different providers, so you don't have to stick with the same vendor if there's a cloud computing service provided by someone else that you want to add to your infrastructure.

Storing data and retrieving it are great uses of the cloud, but there's so much more you can do! From securing your business to testing and developing new products, there are many convincing reasons to switch many of your operations to the cloud.