Top 4 Features of Cloud Services

Throughout recent years, cloud services have spread like wildfire – with good reason. 90% of organizations use the cloud in some way, with 50% using cloud services as their preferred solution. The reason? Cloud services offer multiple distinctive features that businesses want to take advantage of.

As employee and customer demand increases for convenience and mobility, cloud services will continue to advance. What is current today will likely evolve by tomorrow – but the nature of the cloud allows it to change without affecting its users. Organizations have been successfully implementing cloud solutions to attain better productivity, flexibility, and security.

Here are the top four features of cloud services, and how they help your business.

1. Scalability

One of the most powerful features of cloud services is their ability to scale with your company. Cloud services grow and shrink to meet your active demands, which means the size of your company doesn’t actually dictate your capabilities. In other words, you don’t need to meet a certain size requirement to utilize and update your cloud services (unlike many other services).

Here’s a practical example. You’re running a startup company that consists of five people. Your employees need a place to store their data. However, this data storage solution must also allow your employees to selectively access each other’s files. And, if necessary, it must seamlessly accommodate additional employees (for when that boost in sales results in a hiring frenzy). With cloud services, you can add and remove space with ease and virtually no interruption of your service or operations.

2. Accessibility

A chief concern of many modern organizations is the ability to work remotely. The act of implementing bring your own device (BYOD) policies are a possibility with the use of the cloud. BYOD trends in the modern workplace are already strong, with 89% of companies allowing personal devices to connect to corporate networks and 88% of American small businesses already embracing BYOD.

As the name implies, cloud services aren’t tied to grounded IT infrastructure. Your organization’s files are hosted online, meaning that you can get to them through any internet-capable device. That gives you and your employees supreme mobility, allowing you to work from anywhere at any time. In short, you can get more work done on your own terms and still meet customer expectations.

3. File Versioning

Back in the olden days, overwritten files were largely done for. Need a critical document that you just saved over? Too bad, it’s gone forever. Thankfully, the modern features of cloud services eliminate this annoyance completely. File versioning is a practice of storing each individual “save” of a file as a separate version of itself.

If you have a file that you’ve accidentally overwritten, there’s no problem. Cloud-based file versioning allows you to easily revert back to an older version of your choosing. These files will automatically autosave in set periods of time, meaning you don’t even have to be completely conscious of your saving to get your files back.  

4. Financial Flexibility

Cloud services are hardly one-size-fits-all. Much like their scalability, their affordability makes them a powerful tool in the hands of capable businesses. Cloud solutions come in multiple tiers of service, each with their own benefits. They typically operate on a per-user basis which makes them incredibly convenient to budget around and plan for. You’ll never have to guess how much adding or removing users will affect your IT spend or your bottom line.

Cloud Services with Affinity

With the correct cloud tools at your disposal, your organization can write its own ticket for success. You can leverage the features of cloud services to grant your employees far greater flexibility and accessibility than ever before. In return, you’ll see a boost in productivity.

Want to learn more about cloud services and how they can benefit you? Contact us today.