Professional Services

The benefits of the Cloud

By Tony Houlihan, Chief Technical Officer, TwentyFour IT Services Ltd

Over the past few years the end user IT landscape has been changing drastically. Many businesses are now looking to managed services and Cloud providers to offer unprecedented levels of network resilience, flexibility, mobility and performance through the use of Cloud driven applications and infrastructures.

Particularly within the SME market space moving your infrastructure to the Cloud can have many benefits over traditional on-premise servers and desktops which many companies find it difficult to understand. Yet in many cases people within these businesses have already been using the Cloud for many years. We have all seen the benefits of these services, like having an always on accessible from anywhere and at any time service at very low cost or even free in some instances.

Of course, the use of a webmail service is just dipping the smallest part of your little toe into the Cloud. So, what does it really mean for a business to move to the Cloud and what benefits can they see from transitioning from an on-premise server and desktop solution to a Cloud-based one?

To help answer this question set out below are the top five reasons and benefits of considering a move to the Cloud:

Access to your systems from any device, from anywhere

One of the key benefits of a hosted desktop solution is the ability for users to access their data and applications from any device, anywhere. Whether it's their office applications or accounting packages or their ERP and CRM suites. They are all accessible at a moments’ notice from any location using pretty much any device.

This corresponds nicely if you have remote or home workers or maybe satellite offices, all of whom can collaborate and work on the same systems using standardised platforms quickly and securely.

Financial benefits

Hosted desktop solutions are typically priced on a per user basis reducing the need for large capital expenditure. Companies enjoy a low fixed monthly fee per user for all their licensing, support, backup and storage. Which can grow and shrink as your business requirements change meaning you can better forecast for the future.

Furthermore, in a recent guide published by VMware entitled Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for Dummies, VMware stated that: “By virtualising desktops and applications and moving to the cloud, organisations can realize many benefits — centralised and simplified management and orchestration, greater business agility, improved security and compliance, and reduced IT capital expenditures (CAPEX) and total cost of ownership (TCO) — across their entire IT infrastructure portfolio, from servers, storage, and networking to desktops and applications”.

By having desktops hosted it can significantly reduce the licensing, purchase and ongoing maintenance costs of your IT estate.

Improved reliability

With a 99.999% up time guarantee (offered by most hosted desktop providers), a business can always be online and working. Most providers host clients’ data in secure data centres, behind corporate grade firewalls and offer 24/7 support along with disaster and recovery services. By using server farms if a server host fails the workload is simply moved to another server within the farm to continue the work without interrupting the users.

This is complemented by having geo-redundant replication sites meaning if the data centre goes off line the workloads can be re-established in pretty much real time in a secondary location with little or zero disruption to the end user.

Scalability

With a hosted desktop solution, companies can scale up and down scale to meet business changes, meaning you only pay for what you use, when you use it. This is true for the resources required to run your applications and desktop efficiently as well as the number of users a business may have.

Imagine a user’s PC running slowly and being able to give it more memory or processing power at the touch of a button, rather than needing an engineer to install more capacity to get that PC running back to an acceptable level. When businesses need more resource, this can simply be deployed by the end user, meaning applications always run at optimal speed.

Improved productivity

With hosted desktops and Cloud-based apps, there is better connectivity and collaboration among the work force working in different geographical locations. All employees can access the same information and data anywhere, anytime. This results in improved collaboration among the team members which leads to improved performance.