- 1/666 Doncaster Rd, Doncaster VIC 3108
- 1300 052 726
- info@jasco.net.au
Organisations are always looking for ways to ensure their technological environment stands up with the 21st century. With a major shift and acceleration towards a remote and/or a hybrid work environment, businesses need to accommodate cloud hosting. Hosting your infrastructure in cloud has a plethora of benefits and ensures that your organisation can work from any location safely and securely. A recent Deloitte study concluded that there has been a huge shift towards the usage cloud services, with 42% of businesses in Australia now using paid cloud technology. The adoption of cloud services by businesses in Australia has resulted in a cumulative productivity benefit to the economy of $9.4 billion over the last 5 years, and 78% of users have reported improvements in productivity and efficiency since using cloud services.
This blog will cover everything you need to know about the cloud and cloud hosting, from the benefits of cloud hosting, why you should switch to cloud hosting, and a highlight of the Microsoft Azure platform. This blog will help gain insight into the technology and how it can be used within your organisation to maximise your IT spend and reach organisational goals. If you are on the fence about trusting cloud technology, this blog is for you.
Jasco Consulting has different cloud offerings tailored to suit your unique organisation. With over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, we are constantly adapting to new technologies and embracing change. The recent pandemic has shown us more than ever how important it is to be innovative with your IT and utilize features that can facilitate multiple styles of work.
Cloud hosting entails applications and websites being hosted on multiple servers to balance the load or stress and maximise uptime. Instead of using one single server, cloud hosting utilises multiple interconnected servers to ensure that even if one server fails, the others will kick in and keep everything running. This also means that all your data, applications, email, or software are accessible anywhere on the go.
Utilising cloud services is generally popular with organisations that have mission-critical functions on their website, whether that be e-commerce sites, lead generation sites, high traffic projects, or corporate websites. The scalable approach makes it affordable, appealing to the smaller organisations who expect high web traffic during certain times of year that they can plan for.
The main benefits of cloud hosting include:
Cost-Efficiency
With cloud hosting, you don’t need to worry about having infrastructure on-premise and the initial cost that incurs. Instead, you only have to pay for the space you are actually using, which is extremely cost-effective. If your requirements grow, then you can very easily increase your space as you go.
Increased Security
Cloud hosting comes with established infrastructure with multiple layers of security for data, networks, applications, and physical damage security. Cloud service providers also provide secure and encrypted solutions, backup recovery, firewalls, identity management, and data isolation and storage segregation.
Scalability of Resources
Cloud hosting makes it incredibly easy to scale up or down your service. With instant resource allocation of storage, bandwidth, or RAM, your cloud usage can scale with your organisation as it needs.
No Locked in Location
Traditional hosting servers are tied to a fixed location. For this reason, you need to choose a server that is fairly close to you so as not to compromise your website’s loading speed. Cloud hosting servers, however, are available and accessible via the internet and with any PC or mobile device, from any location around the world.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
For cloud hosting and the multi-server setup, it means that your information is consistently being backed up and in the event of one server failing, the data can be accessed from other servers meaning rapid recovery. In a traditional sense if you had not physically backed up your data seconds before failure you would lose any progress made after that backup.
Environmentally Friendly
Cloud hosting as a collective will help to reduce the carbon footprint of organisations. If every organisation utilises and shares cloud hosting platforms that are fully utilised they don’t need to have single or multiple servers running at their physical location being used not at capacity, wasting energy.
Increased Server Uptime
The website’s performance is directly correlated to server uptime, meaning that traditionally if your server went down, it would take time to fix and your website and applications would be unreachable, however with the cloud hosting model data is stored on multiple servers and thus the load is passed onto other capable servers, reducing downtime.
Cloud hosting may be scary to those who have never utilised it before, with the idea of your infrastructure living in the ‘cloud’ being confusing and hard to grasp. Being able to physically have your server at the office may feel like you have more control over the environment and believing you can ensure nothing goes wrong. Some are sceptical about the security requirements of their data as well, having to trust other organisations won’t lose their data or leak it. However, but keeping physical infrastructure, you are more at risk, as there are less physical security capabilities. Physical servers are not safe from failure, natural disasters and internal hacks, with extremely hard to recover data. So, cloud hosting can save a lot of stress by taking away that burden and allowing specialists to look after your data for you.
Not only this but having your data available anywhere in the world Is one of the biggest positives of cloud hosting. In the remote working world that we currently live in, being able to access your data from any location has never been more important.
As far as cloud platforms go, there are many different choices and reasons why you could get each one. For this specific blog, I will unpack Microsoft Azure’s cloud capabilities as an example.
The Azure cloud platform is Microsoft’s cloud service which allows for enhanced security measures and scalable capabilities. Supporting every business within any industry or size, Microsoft Azure offers 4 different forms of cloud computing to its customers: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and serverless.
Azure enables you to manage and deploy apps anywhere at any time whilst utilising your own framework and infrastructure. The Azure cloud offers continuous innovation and supports growth through its scalable approach, being able to increase or decrease workload to save your organisation money.
Secure Foundations
Multi-layered security powered by Microsoft ensures your data is stored in safe and secure ways. With state-of-the-art security controls and added protection against threats like DDoS, over 3,500 cybersecurity experts work together to ensure your business’ data is safe.
Simplified Security
Azure allows you to quickly utilise all services with access to identity, data, networking, and apps. The analytics and insights you can gain through the Azure security center ensures you can gain continuous protection and increase measures where necessary.
Azure Intelligence
Azure intelligence enables threat detection as a service, utilising machine learning, behavioural analytics, and application-based intelligence, to detect threats faster. By detecting threats faster, it can save your business crucial time and effort in protecting against various threats and attacks that may occur.
Overall, cloud hosting is becoming an essential service you should at to your IT environment. The scalability, security, and manoeuvrability ensures your organisation can grow and its IT systems will never be left behind. By utilising the cloud, you can save time and energy by letting other companies worry about your data and systems reliably. If any of these benefits rings true to your organisation or you would like to talk to our experts about how cloud hosting could work for you, feel free to reach out below.
