Introduction

It's a difficult decision to make when choosing how your business is going to store and host its data and essential IT infrastructure, and for good reason too. Regardless of whatever option you choose, whether it be to host it yourself or let someone do it for you, it's going to be very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to upgrade in the future.

As such, you want to make sure that you make the right decision in the beginning so that you don't have to deal with these problems later on. Here are 3 reasons why your business should choose a cloud provider to host its core IT infrastructure.

Reason 1 - Pay for what you use / pay-as-you-go

Just like people, businesses come in all shapes and sizes. You might be a new business just entering the market, a medium-sized business that has been around for a couple of years, or an enterprise that has been established for decades.

Regardless of your size, it makes sense that you should only pay for the resources that you are currently using, right? You shouldn't have to pay 10x than what you currently need when setting up your IT infrastructure just to be able to accommodate your business's future growth.

This is where cloud providers have an unfair advantage that you can't ignore. With a cloud provider, you only ever pay for the resources your business is currently using. Let's say you're a small business that only currently has 100 GB's of stored data. With a cloud provider, you will only ever pay for that 100 GB, no more, no less, in comparison to paying for a fixed amount of storage which could be far more than you will ever need.

Now let's say that your business has been growing rapidly and has generated over 2 TB's of data. For a cloud provider, this is no problem, as the storage will automatically scale up to fit your needs without you ever having to lift a finger, and the extra costs will simply be added to your monthly bill.

As such, we can see that cloud providers offer a very flexible approach when it comes to scaling with a pay-as-you-go model, which makes it a great choice for small to medium-sized businesses that have unpredictable computing resource requirements.

Reason 2 - Save on hiring

Not all businesses are tech companies, but all companies need technology. This is true more than ever, especially nowadays. Most businesses are using technology in some way for their critical business operations, however, if you're not a tech company directly, you want to make sure that you don't accidentally become one. Let me explain.

Let's say that you need to store some data for your business, and you decide to do so with an on-premesis solution, where you will purchase your own servers and install them in your own physical location. Now you need to hire an entire tech department to manage these servers for you, for both the hardware and the software, not to mention the costs associated with running your own servers e.g. electricity.

Congratulations, your company is now a tech company. You have to dedicate a large chunk of precious business resources to taking care of your business's IT infrastructure.

Now let's consider a cloud solution. You hire a cloud consultant as a contractor to set up your business's IT infrastructure in the cloud for you, and then pay them a monthly retainer for them to make any changes you may need to your IT infrastructure.

You don't have ANY physical hardware to manage, and your cloud consultant handles any changes to your IT infrastructure you may need.

As such, we can see that a cloud solution can prevent you from having to hire an internal IT department to take care of your IT infrastructure, allowing your business to focus on solving the problems that matter most.

Reason 3 - Security and accessibility

When you pay a big cloud provider to handle your IT infrastructure for your business, you're in good hands. These companies have dedicated teams working 24/7 to keep your data secure and accessible around the clock, helping you to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility of your business data at all times.

Reason 4 (Bonus) - Off-the-shelf solutions

The final case I will be making for choosing a cloud provider for your IT infrastructure is for an off-the-shelf solution. Chances are if your business has a problem involving data, data storage, or computation, a cloud provider has a solution for it.

It will almost always be cheaper to use an off-the-shelf solution for your business that to hire someone to build your own custom software to use. Not to mention that when you use a pre-built cloud solution, you're using software actively maintained by the world's most talented software engineers, so you can trust that it will fit your business's needs.

Now, what if the cloud provider doesn't have a pre-built solution for your business? Trick question, they do. Whilst cloud providers can't offer every possible service in existence, they do provide high-performance building blocks that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle to solve your business's problem.

Custom-built cloud solutions provide a reliable, secure, and scalable approach to building out your business's IT infrastructure, and it is my recommended choice for any custom software your business may need. If you need a custom cloud solution for your own business, contact me on LinkedIn.

Conclusion

So hopefully you've now got a better understanding of some of the benefits that the cloud can provide to your business which you can use to make an informed decision on how your business should choose its critical IT infrastructure. If you have any questions, leave a comment below. Thanks for reading!