– Jake Anderson, says:

If you own a business or have been somewhat in the technological loop, you’ll have noticed by now that services like Blue Jeans cloud computing are growing rapidly. Simply put, it is because cloud computing is making the business world run more efficiently than before. Cloud computing has heightened the security of information systems and allowed for more mobile collaboration as a result of easy transfer of information. Here are some basic things you’ll want to know about cloud computing and how to reap its benefits to help your organization:

  1. There are two types of cloud computing you need to be able to distinguish between

There are several varieties of cloud computing services. Depending on your company’s IT needs, you might be able to use a cloud service instead of investing in new IT hardware. Two of the more popular versions of cloud offerings are Software-as-a-Service (like Blue Jeans) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

With Software-as-a-Service, the cloud service provider hosts your enterprise applications and associated data on its servers and storage systems. Users gain access to Software-as-a-Service applications using a Web browser. And your company would typically pay a fee per user per month. With IaaS, the provider offers virtual machines, physical servers, storage, switching, and connectivity resources to run your business applications on a pay-as-you-go basis. You are responsible for installing and maintaining the operating system and application or virtual machine; the provider is responsible for managing the infrastructure hardware that the applications or virtual machines run on.

  1. The use of cloud computing can mean more flexibility in the business

Business today is very dynamic. Cloud services let companies quickly ramp capacity up and down to match business needs. In comparison to legacy hosting services, which often locked companies into contracts for multiple months or years, today’s cloud computing services are offered by the month or based on the consumption of resources. This is a perfect match for some industries, such as retail and financial services, which are subject to boom times and quiet times in their normal business cycles. Maybe you have a new application and are unsure of the speed of growth. A cloud computing service lets you expand and contract IT resources in sync with those cycles.

Need more capacity to handle late summer back to school sales or to support a web site for a trendy service? You can throttle up capacity for several months to support the peak period and then scale back when activities return to normal. Similarly, you can match capacity to demands as business units grow and contract over time. This helps align IT spending with actual needs.

  1. It gives you the ability to improve your information systems without incurring additional capital expenses

This is critical especially for companies that are trying to accommodate new technologies. For instance, many companies today are virtualizing their business applications. To do so, they need the virtual machines associated with those applications to run on powerful and resilient servers. Cloud computing gives companies a way to do this without having to buy new servers. The cloud can be thought of as having limitless space of storage for companies. Many of us have experienced the benefits of cloud already through common personal services like Google Drive. No longer do we have to load up USB memory sticks or excessively backup our electronic devices.

  1. Your business can support more employees and users at the same time

Many data centers are running out of space and have to relocate to more affordable geographical areas. This is forcing some companies to build new data centers or pay a fortune to expand their existing centers. On top of this, the labor costs of simply maintaining the data centers without improvement is draining the IT budget for many companies. Here again, cloud computing allows companies to move their applications to a provider’s infrastructure and save the cost of a data center expansion.

  1. It saves time and provides your employees with more time to prioritize other tasks

IT staff members spend most of their time keeping the system running as per usual. A good portion of an IT staff’s time is dedicated to managing, maintaining, and troubleshooting equipment. Cloud computing providers often offer infrastructure as well as management services, allowing companies to offload those tasks to the provider, thus freeing up IT staff to work on other projects that are more critical to the success of a business.

As you can see, cloud computing can be many things to different companies. The great thing about cloud computing is that the services can help companies be more responsive to market conditions, all while reining in IT costs.