The 10 benefits of Cloud Computing

The growth of cloud computing is astounding. According to Gartner’s recently published research 50% of enterprises will have some form of Cloud strategy by 2015.

The reasons for this phenomenal growth are many. Here are the reasons we can think of:

1. Mobile working
There is a trend to mobile working, many of us have our main computer but also work on a laptop, iPad and/or phone. With Cloud systems your data and systems will be accessible from anywhere they have Internet access – at work, at home, or on the road.

One of the ways to be more productive is to use transition time. So, if you are in-between jobs or meetings you can be productive.

With Cloud Computing, your employees can work with your information from wherever they are and from any device. As we will see later, Xero is an accounting system and employees can enter their expenses direct.

2. Lower costs
For growing companies limited by finances, cloud computing brings some down-to-earth benefits. One of the most important is that Cloud Computing helps businesses cut costs by sharing resources.

Most businesses have a high degree of variability in their use of IT resources. Yet when you manage these resources in-house, you must allow for the highest expected requirements or fail to meet the demands of your customers and the needs of your employees. The result is that, typically, businesses use only 5% to 15% of the capacities of their servers.

But in the cloud, you don’t pay for idle capacity. So you don’t need to provide full-time resources to meet spikes in demand. This cuts costs but you’ll also be able to reduce the expense of maintaining your current in-house IT infrastructure. With Cloud Computing, the majority of this maintenance will now be done at and by your Cloud service provider.

3. Less capital tied up
Because you are, in effect, renting instead of buying technology, you convert capital investments to operating expenses.

Capital expenditures are reduced because you no longer need to buy hardware to update obsolete servers and because there are no longer large up-front expenses in the form of hefty software licenses.

4. Monthly payments
Instead you pay a smaller and more predictable monthly service fee, typically 30% to 50% less than your total cost of IT today. This allows you to spread out your costs, and eases your cash flow.

5. Scalability
Another major benefit of Cloud Computing is scalability  When needed, you can scale your capacity up or down according to your needs without having to worry about purchasing, or disposing of, servers or storage.

In the cloud, storage, and processing power are not issues as the service providers add more servers or shift load from one server to another to provide additional capacity. Thus, as your business grows, your systems will scale smoothly from a handful of people to hundreds or more.

6. Automatic data back-up
Cloud storage is very beneficial. When your systems are hosted in the Cloud, both server data and that on your desktops and laptops will be backed up automatically and securely on a consistent and timely basis. This ensures increased reliability and saves users from the threat of losing unrecoverable data on their computers.

7. Business continuity
If your business has a fire or theft it can be a real struggle to get back up. With Cloud you buy new devices and you are ready to go.

Slightly less dramatic, we’ve all seen the problems the weather can cause for people getting to work. Once again, with Cloud systems people can work from home accessing their personal and business data, just as if they’d been sitting at their desks.

8. Sustainability
Cloud Computing also uses less energy than traditional server rooms. This is important to the many companies committed to sustainability. By sharing resources in the Cloud, instead of buying more hardware, you can reduce your carbon footprint.

One less server put into service is one less server consuming electricity. The collective benefit accrued through millions of companies switching to cloud computing is immense and is considered a responsible business practice by most environmental groups.

9. Regular updates
Because Cloud systems are not hosted locally, it is easy to update the software.

The attitude of Cloud vendors is to constantly improve the software and any bugs or fixed can be corrected immediately with the minimum amount of hassle.

10. Collaboration
You can work with people using Cloud. This can be customers, suppliers, co-workers and advisers.

As accountants North London this means we can work with clients all over the UK.