Is The Cloud Your Best Option?

As you can imagine, it’s difficult to find the time to constantly push new content out, when you’re in charge of sales and marketing.  For the past six plus years, we’ve subscribed (as do many of our peers) to a service which provides us with blog posts on a weekly basis.  We ‘white label’ these posts, and share them on our corporate blog with Ashton Solutions as the writer. It’s a great service at a very low cost, and it allows us to push even more valuable content to our followers.  But we’ve learned that we need to be very careful in what we’re regurgitating.  The post we received for today, August 10, 2020, is all about how great the cloud is (the full post appears below).  Yes, it can save costs, and it’s been great for people who’ve needed to work from home over the past few months…  But really?  There’s only one downside to the cloud?  It’s thinking like this that is precisely why we so frequently have to bring businesses back from the cloud.

Note: The cloud is not for everyone.  For starters, putting your business entirely in the cloud means you are now completely dependent upon your internet connection (and if you’re in the cloud, you’d better have redundancy with your connection). It also means that you’re moving all of your files up and down to/from the cloud on a regular basis. If you’re an architect, engineer, designer, or any number of other types who work with extremely large files, chances are, you will not be happy with the delay in getting your data, or working on your data.

Feel free to continue reading about how great the cloud is, and let us know your thoughts. The benefits can be huge, but too many times, there is no thought process put into a migration to the cloud. If your provider is pushing you to move (or if you’re demanding a move), you should make sure to sit down and think the whole thing through before you click the ‘buy’ button.

(original post below)

Cloud Computing’s Benefits

In many ways, cloud computing seems like a bit of a no-brainer. As a secure and reliable platform, businesses can accomplish more without the concerns of security failures that once held them back. As a result, the cloud can provide the accessibility, mobility, and scalability today’s businesses need in a way that is very cost-effective. Since the provider maintains the cloud infrastructure, the business that subscribes to their services only needs to pay a manageable monthly fee.

Through this arrangement, businesses can access exactly the infrastructure that they will need—software and hardware maintenance included—available on a sliding scale. Any changes, increasing or decreasing resources, are as simple to make as can be. This simplicity is part of the reason that so many business processes are now entrusted to cloud services, from backup and communications to security and storage.

The Potential Downside to the Cloud

For all its benefits, there is one factor that makes the cloud a less appealing option: its costs.

Now, this can be hard for some people to believe. After all, an on-premise infrastructure requires you to purchase the expensive hardware and software needed to support it, deploy these resources where they are called for, and manage it. How can cloud computing be more expensive than that?

Simple: building an IT infrastructure has certain costs associated with it that need to be addressed.

That’s just it—the majority of cloud platforms aren’t delivered at a flat rate. While a service like Software as a Service can come at a relatively low monthly rate, once you begin the customization processes upon your cloud you’ll likely see your costs expand beyond what your own infrastructure would have cost.

The cloud can be either cost-effective or expensive. To help you avoid your budget being undermined by the added values of cloud computing, reach out to the IT professionals at Ashton Technology Solutions. We’ll assess your situation and assist you in implementing the best solution for your needs. Give us a call at 216 397-4080 to learn more.