As a business owner or manager, you know that continuous, steady growth is an essential part of success. When you’re ready to get serious about scaling your organization, several vital activities must take place. Documented workflows and processes, streamlined hiring, onboarding and training, well-oiled marketing systems, are some that top the list. One key but often overlooked element of scaling success that can make or break your efforts, is leveraging technology to enhance operations quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.
One of the resources necessary for growth is the cloud. The cloud, which now integrates with numerous AI tools, giving it more capabilities than ever before, allows you to streamline and automate your operations without large, unnecessary investments.
In this article we’ll cover what the cloud is, the major benefits you should take advantage of, and how you can use it to grow your organization without overspending.
The cloud is simply a global infrastructure of servers that gives you remote, on-demand access to computer system resources, including data storage, over the Internet, instead of on your own servers and computers. With these capabilities, your business doesn’t need to invest in its own hardware or software licenses, allowing you to pay only for what you use, when you use it. Software and hardware can be expensive, making this a great solution for businesses in growth mode with finite budgets.
How can the cloud help your organization? Here are 5 benefits to consider:
- Economies of Scale – As mentioned, with most cloud-based programs you can expand the services as your business grows. When revenue increases and you take on more clients, you can choose to upgrade your services or invest in new features or capabilities, so you never pay for more than you need at the time. It takes only a few clicks from an administrator.
- Enhanced Collaboration – In a digital world, we need real-time access to tools for collaboration, no matter where our employees are. Cloud-based programs can typically be accessed anywhere in the world on any device by multiple members of the team simultaneously. This allows for colleagues to work on projects together even if they aren’t in a physical office or are in different time zones, increasing productivity all around.
- Increased Automation – You can save money and your employees’ time by having cloud-based programs automate certain repeatable tasks such as regular backups, logging and monitoring networks, resource allocation and much more. Most business owners don’t know how many tasks they can automate, or how much money and time they can save until they have an IT professional review their network.
- Faster Access to Resources – With the cloud, your employees no longer have to wait for extensive downloads or installations. Most tools are readily available almost instantly at log-in, making it easier and faster to get work done.
- Reduced Disaster Recovery Costs – Disasters rarely damage cloud-based data and assets that are hosted virtually on servers in secured data centers, not on hardware in your office. Your IT professional should have multiple backups of your data, so if something goes wrong, it will be easy to get it back up and running.
Cloud-based programs are a great resource for business owners who want to scale. They are easy to use, simple and flexible to expand, cost-effective, great for collaboration, more secure than other programs and much more.
If you think you’re not harnessing all the power that cloud tools provide, then the next best step would be to have an IT professional do an in-depth review of your current network to find the areas of opportunity in your business.
We offer a FREE Network Assessment, where we’ll extensively review your network and sit down with you to review what should be done differently to save you money and enhance your business operations. If you’re serious about scaling and want to do it the right way, click here to book a Network Assessment with our team or call our office at 281-403-9561 to get a meeting on the schedule.