Additional benefits of the cloud for companies
The main differences between your personal cloud experience and enterprise cloud offerings involve feature strength. For example, with scalability, commercial offerings are designed to scale up or down on demand, offering flexibility and pay-per-use. The upside is (almost) limitless. With home offerings like the personal cloud, there are limits.
Security is taken even more seriously to meet specific baseline recommendations with SLAs for operating system updates and patch management. One of the main non-human causes of IT breaches is companies not keeping servers up-to-date with security patches. Cloud security for the enterprise can even comply with corporate policy or regulatory schemes, for example, SOC 2 Type II certifications.
In 2019, Physio Practice Software Australia added a new advertising cycle for cloud security. They said at the time that security concerns were the main objection to companies not adopting public cloud technology. Disaster recovery is something that few home users take seriously. Backup and failover systems are built into cloud services for businesses.
Flexibility. Enterprise cloud services generally allow you to add capacity when needed and scale back when you don't. For example, you could turn on an additional 100 virtual machines in the cloud for a workshop on Wednesday and turn them off at the end of the day. It is pay-per-use. Available on demand.
Applications. Practice Management Software delves into the apps available in a future blog post. But for now, know that enterprise cloud providers have designed their offerings to handle the volume, speed, variety, accuracy, and value of big data. That includes cognitive computing and analytics. Another difference that doesn't come into play with personal cloud computing is whether the architecture is on-premises, full cloud, or hybrid.
What does all this mean for your business?
The key difference between the enterprise cloud and the personal cloud is a matter of scale and perhaps robustness. (To be fair, I'm not sure "robustness" is a valid difference when you consider that the personal Google Drive app supports over a billion users.) To look at this same list of benefits from a business perspective, the cloud helps businesses tackle real-world problems that are particularly challenging in the current economic climate. Allied Health Practice Management Software can summarize the business benefits in key domains.
Operations. If people are the backbone, operations are the nervous system. The cloud provides the infrastructure and ongoing maintenance. Benefits for IT include reduced costs, security, flexibility, scalability, regular updates, robust security, and disaster recovery.
Business value. PPMP found that companies implementing the cloud broadly are gaining a competitive advantage. Several years ago, these businesses set the tone. Today, using analytics to gain insights from big data is just a gamble on the table. Still, you can provide a competitive advantage by seamlessly sharing data internally and with remote users and making data-driven decisions. In 2020 - in the midst of the pandemic - successful companies accelerated “digital transformation ", and... a big part of that was an accelerated shift to the cloud."
