Cloud storage has been there for a while. In the last decade or so it has been the most discussed topic in the world of Information Technology. They offer several incentives to your business in terms of reliability, scalability and cost advantage. While large organizations have moved their data and tools to the cloud, the adoption of cloud storage among small businesses and individuals hasn’t been on the same scale. This brings us to a very important question – how can you benefit by moving your storage to the cloud.
Here We Look at Five Reasons Why You Should Switch to the Cloud Storage and the Benefits This Will Bring to You.
1. Never Lose a File or Image
How often have you cursed your fate in having lost those memorable pictures of your vacation to a hard drive crash or phone theft? If you have been using smartphones and laptops for a while you’d surely have experienced this personally. Loosing private pictures and videos hurts you as they are priceless and you can never go back in time to click those pictures or shoot those videos.
By switching over to online photo and video storage you will save yourself from the pain and agony of losing your memorable images and videos. This serves as a backup of all those precious memories in your life when your device breaks down or it is lost. Most cloud storage services offer you the auto-upload option. Any new images and videos in your gallery/folder would be uploaded directly into the cloud saving you from the labor of having to do this manually.
2. Cloud Is Reliable
Every time an important presentation or document is created you’d ask your team to back it up somewhere else. Why do you do it? The answer is simple – local storage is unreliable and your hard drive might crash or the flash drive might refuse to respond without sending out a warning. While this strategy may have worked for you the question is why stick to a system that is unreliable in the first place?
Cloud storage on the other hand is extremely reliable as all your data is stored in cloud and not in a single location as is the case with local storage media. Multiple copies of your files are stored in different locations across the world and hence you will be able to access them anywhere and anytime. If you are working on a Disaster Recovery Plan, cloud storage would be the first step towards that goal.
3. It is Safe
We don’t need to educate you on the kind of threat that is constantly looming over your head. Even the best anti-virus and anti-malware software installed in your device can be breached. Losing customer data, company’s upcoming plans or other valuable documents to an external attack can deliver a deathblow to your business. In most cases individuals and small businesses tend to rely on free security tools or not have them at all. This obvious as the top of the line anti-virus programs are out of their budget.
Cloud storage would let you overcome this threat as they have the most stringent security protocols. These service providers invest in state-of-the-art tools and firewall that would keep your data safe and prevent any breach. You can also make use of permission based access that lets only authorized team members in your organization to access files and resources. This will help you in keeping your organization’s important resources safe and away from prying eyes.
4. Improve Collaboration
In a typical corporate environment your organization would be generating tons of data every single day. Spreadsheet, documents, PDFs, presentations are being made by your team as you read this piece. Most of these resources would need to be shared between team and in many cases different individuals and teams would need to collaborate while creating these documents. As the volume of document grows so does the pain in storing them in an organized manner and finding them when needed.
By moving these to cloud storage you will ease sharing of these resources among your team members and also improve collaboration. Your team will never lose an important document in trail of emails or have to use flash drives to share it. Making use of online storage also ensures that no document is ever lost in the event of system crashes or an employee leaving the organization considering the fact that BYOD (bring your own device) has come almost the norm in today’s corporate world.
5. Cloud Is Cost Effective
One of the least stated advantages of cloud storage is the cost. The reason this is less stated is due to the fact that most people never bother about the cost of storage as they have several gigs of storage space in your phones and laptops. While you will never run out of storage space if you are creating few documents here and there but the moment you start storing photos, videos and animation available space on your storage devices starts to run dry. This is when you are forced to buy that flash drive external hard drives.
The cost of these external storage devices is astronomically high when compared to cloud storage services. In fact if you compare the price of a flash drive to cloud storage you will be paying only a small fraction per GB over timeline of 5-7 years (average life of flash drives) and that too with security and flexibility that cloud storage solutions offer you. There are cloud service providers who offer hundreds of GB worth of cloud storage space absolutely free!
To sum up you clearly see the incentives of switching to cloud storage. Floppy drives are long dead and gone, CDs and DVDs aren’t even considered a serious option of storage anymore and it is only a matter of time before the HDD and Flash Drives also make way for cloud storage. It’s safe, it’s flexible and it’s the future of storage. Join the CLOUD today.
Summary – In this write-up we looked at the incentives cloud storage offers and five reasons why you should switch to the cloud.
BIO:
This is a contributor from Kathryn Prigge who writes about Cloud Storage for https://www.blomp.com
