I want to tell you some of the success stories we had with small sized businesses benefit from cloud computing and the main reason for this article is to make people believe that in 2017 cloud is no longer some fancy word or somethine to be scared, but it is rather something your business must start using.
First story is a recent one - a client is starting new business in the accounting and financial consulting field. The client is a great professional already having decent amount of work and wanted to scale up the business by growing the team with a few new members. At this point they needed some good working environment and easy to setup and scale services. Key points in their requirements were to have shared storage for their working documents and to be able to easily use it from multiple locations like not only from the office, but from home or on a travel as well.
Although this could be some sort of solved with some document sharing service, we wanted to think a little deeper into their needs and try to help them solve some future issues.
We've came up with the idea to use entirely cloud based virtual desktop workstations. This brings some key benefits to the client:
- Moving the team on a powerful cloud workstation required single installation of the specific software products they need. That not only simplifies the setup, but as well makes far easier for support and updates. The other way around was to be installing the software on each personal computer which was going to quickly become a typical support chore.
- It's easy to start and scale as the business grows. Now that it's all setup on a single workstation, joining a new team member is as easy as adding a new user. All applications, access to documents and setups required are all in place.
- Team members can access their workstation from anywhere which immediately prooved as very useful. Imagine you need to do an urgent task, but you are at home and your files were on your office machine or you forgot your laptop at work. Moving the workstations on a cloud machine, ressolved this issue to simply finding any PC, tablet or mobile device and connecting to your workstation, with your applications open and all your work files in place.
- It is secure and reliable. Another crucial benefit is that now the workstations are on a cloud server data loss risk is significantly reduced. You no longer have to worry about things like a hard disk getting broken or your laptop getting lost or stolen. All the important data is stored on a redundant machine with regular backups.
The short term effect is that instead of bothering about technical stuff, the client was able to focus on starting smoothly. The long term benefits are yet to come with all the risks reduced to minimum and the easy scaling making the growth and success limitless at least in the terms of technology.
