Top Five Tips: How cloud can help your business grow

The use of technology is among one of the greatest challenges facing medium sized businesses. It also presents one of the biggest transformational opportunities to drive growth, promote innovation, reduce costs and ensure your business maintains a competitive edge.

1. Free up resources
Most businesses today are concerned about the state of the economy. Moving in-house hardware and software to a highly secure data centre means it can be delivered back as a fully managed service. This shifts focus away from worrying about whether IT is optimised to instead focusing valuable resources on innovation and business development.

2. Reduce risk and cost
Cloud adoption helps you to reduce costs on both IT investments and the business operating cost. Technology is ever-changing, and at a rapid rate. Keeping up-to-date with the latest advances is both expensive and distracting, while continually providing adequate training to staff adds additional costs. Leveraging outside expertise reduces risks and costs while providing peace of mind that you and your customers are protected around the clock.

3. Build in scale and agility
Opportunity may or may not be just around the corner, but when it does come,the need to enhance business capabilities can be pressing. Building applications on a cloud platform minimises the delay in deploying new IT–based capabilities. The right technology framework through the cloudmeans operational capacity can be expanded at short notice and at a cost that can beeasily managed.

4. Tap into new capabilities
Everyone recognises that technology can help save money by making business processes more efficient. But, understanding and utilising the latest technologies as and when they come to market can help businesses reach new audiences, access new markets, improve the ability to analyse performance and inspire new ideas.

5. Business Innovation
Innovation is critical to business success, but it costs money, doesn’t always succeed and is inherently risky. With updates and upgrades arriving thick and fast it can be easy to forget that alternative ways of working are available that might serve your business better. Moreover, the ability to test out new ideas in a low risk manner offers new opportunities to unlock growth and provides the confidence to be ambitious.

Integrated cloud services can help overcome the challenges presented by custom-built solutions and enables your business to leverage existing expertise and technology and offer more tangible benefits.