The cloud is no longer a thing of the future; it’s here, and everybody’s jumping on board.
In fact, cloud solutions are the driving force behind the latest and greatest solutions in information technology—which begs the question, what’s keeping you from migrating your organization’s processes to the cloud?
For those still on the fence, the advantages of switching from on-premise to cloud-based solutions can be broken down into three basic categories:
- Flexibility
- Security
- Financial Viability
Optimizing these three aspects of a cloud deployment can help ensure that you maximize your return on investment (ROI) and minimize potential complications as you leverage new technology.
Flexibility
Migrating the bulk of your operations to the cloud offers an elevated layer of flexibility for your team. This is especially true if you have various enterprise asset management (EAM) systems such as a computerized maintenance management system or an engineering document management system.
Even for organizations with complex integrations, the cloud provides users the flexibility to access files and applications remotely from almost any device. Having an EAM platform that houses its data on the cloud offers technicians, maintenance professionals (i.e., maintenance managers, system administrators) and other users the ability to remotely access information related to:
- Preventative maintenance (i.e., work order tracking and scheduling)
- Asset management (i.e., performance tracking)
- Concurrent engineering initiatives (i.e., viewing documents that are in multiple locations to see who’s doing what on a specific piece of equipment)
Having anytime, anywhere access to such critical data will skyrocket connectivity and accessibility, saving your organization two of its most valuable assets: time and money.
Security
The idea of not having your data stored safely on your own property might concern you, particularly as data protection, cybersecurity threats and data loss become increasingly pressing threats. That said, the cloud is typically much safer than storing data in an on-premise solution.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. While burgeoning cloud-based systems used to be less secure than their on-premise counterparts, this has changed in recent years as cloud companies have worked to improve their reputations, attract clients and stay in business.
Now, cloud-based cybersecurity measures – including encryption, ongoing compliance capability and continuous software updates – are likely more robust than your own. As a result, data stored by security professionals in the cloud won’t be subject to phishing emails, malware, or any other common methods used to compromise your devices.
Cloud providers take additional precautions to keep your data secure, including:
- Continual security patches and updates
- Artificial intelligence-based tools
- Firewalls
- Redundancy
This makes cloud’s security and data best practices extremely robust.
Financial Viability
The financial benefits of moving to the cloud might be the most exciting part of the process. On average, transitioning your EAM platform to the cloud will save you $10,000 a year in hardware and upkeep and $61,000 a year in overhead costs. Additionally, you won’t experience any of the surprise fees that come with housing your own servers or your own on-premise system.
Why is this so important? When your network is down, you bleed money. Your team doesn’t bring in revenue, your clients lose faith in you, potential customers can’t find you – the list goes on. In 2019, for example, the average cost of network downtime reached an all-time high of $9,000 per minute—a 60% increase from the average $5,617 per minute in 2012. These are unnecessary costs that can snowball over time and negatively impact your overall efficiency, uptime and ROI.
Cloud hosting offers more reliable recovery from unplanned downtime while facilitating planned downtime through scheduled updates and patches. This can tighten up your budget and allow your team to better plan for predictable and unpredictable costs – which, in turn, can help you allocate more money to other essential areas.
Parting Words
No matter which side of the fence you land on, there’s no denying that cloud-based technology is evolving fast, especially given the post-pandemic shift to a more remote, multi-site workforce. And it will only become more powerful over the next several months. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that “the aggressive move to cloud, already proceeding at a healthy clip before the pandemic, will spike in 2021, yielding even greater enterprise adoption, cloud provider revenue, and business value in 2021.”
In short, cloud computing is the future --which begs the question: if you haven’t transitioned to the cloud, what are you waiting for?
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