With more businesses moving to the cloud, it’s important to know the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing to ensure it’s the best fit for your business. Though cloud computing has been around for the last couple decades, it’s only been fairly recently that adoption has become widespread.
A Gartner report from earlier this year indicates that by 2025, 65.9% of money spent on application software will be reallocated toward cloud computing—a significant increase from 57.7% in 2022. That’s not even addressing the space you’ll save from not needing a data center in your office.
There are a couple of cloud-based services (and terms) you should be aware of:
- Infrastructure as a service: IaaS is the basic foundation of cloud storage, offering pay-as-you go options for storage, networking, and other essentials
- Software as a service: SaaS is a way to access software over the Internet, often with users subscribing to an application
- Platform as a service: PaaS offers operating systems databases, web servers, and other tools over your internet connection
All of these components are essential to the flexibility and rapid response time offered by cloud platform services.
What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud-Based Storage?
The advantages of cloud computing cover the speed of deployment and overall flexibility, cost efficiency, additional security with an emphasis on loss prevention, scalability, and makes collaboration easy. Below, let’s take a look at some of the advantages of cloud technology:
1. Speed of Deployment and Overall Flexibility
If your business is both time- and budget-conscious, you know that your team only has so much time to focus on IT-related issues. Working in tandem with an outsourced IT service, your cloud computing services offer more flexibility in terms of hosting, rather than keeping information on a local server.
If you need additional cloud service, your outsourced IT team can spin up a new deployment in a short period of time—think only a matter of seconds.
2. Cost Efficiency
Another of the advantages of cloud storage lies in its cost efficiency: By moving to the cloud, you save money on acquiring and maintaining equipment. When looking at the cost of cloud infrastructure, it’s important to look at more than ROI. Easy access to data means easier implementation of new company initiatives and project rollouts.
Cloud computing offers are also customarily pay-as-you-go services, which means that you pay for the storage and services you need. Working with the cloud also means you’ll have less downtime, and that means less money lost.
3. Security
When weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud, security should feature prominently in your considerations. Cyber security, for example, helps prevent data breaches and other forms of cyber crime, and in this prevention, saves the company revenue, time, and customer loyalty.
The cloud protects data storage and other assets by encrypting data, with features like granular permissions, access control, and authentication. Loss prevention is also a key consideration, as it helps keep important data safe from cyber attacks.
4. Scalability
With the flexibility of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, it’s no stretch of the imagination to consider that cloud services are easily scalable. Different-sized ventures have different IT needs, and the cloud enables businesses to scale up or down as need arises.
If you need to scale up your cloud infrastructure, you don’t need to worry about physical server space. You can also boost your data storage, processing capacity, and networking.
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5. Ease of Collaboration
Many of the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing a cloud collaboration solution remain consistent across cloud services, but another of the prominent advantages of working with the cloud is how easy it is to collaborate with coworkers. Any person with an Internet connection and the right credentials can access the information they need from anywhere.
Cloud Storage Disadvantages and Advantages
Due diligence with research can prevent a number of the disadvantages of cloud computing, and one of these is vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock-in occurs when you’re stuck using a product or a service that is no longer viable for your business, but it’s also not practical to switch away. One way to get around vendor lock-in is working with a hybrid cloud model.
Another disadvantage you should be aware of is limited control. When you outsource your IT service, you have much less control over backend infrastructure and other operations. You can mitigate loss of control by doing in-depth research about cloud service and managed service provider offerings.
Moving to the cloud boosts your business’s productivity, security, and collaboration. Speak with a consultant today to learn more about what the cloud can do for you.
