To help you, we have put together a list of pros and cons to cloud hosting.
When talking to our customers and prospective new customers, we are often asked about cloud hosting. There are advantages and disadvantages to both on-premise and cloud hosting and it really is up to you as a business to decide which option is best for you. To help you, we have put together a list of pros and cons to cloud hosting:
Benefits of cloud hosting
- Reduce costs: cloud technology means that you don’t need costly servers onsite taking up space and requiring maintenance and replacing over time
- Free up IT staff’s time: if you have an in-house IT team then you can free up their time as they won’t need to manage servers; if you don’t have one, then you don’t need to pay someone to come in and look after them!
- Reduce downtime to your business: you don’t need to worry about server failure disrupting your business as all you need is an internet connection to access your files
- Flexible working: similarly, if you have an internet connection you can work anytime and anywhere, and from any device
- Centralised data and documents: all your files can be saved in one location and are accessible anywhere through the cloud
- Data recovery: documents can be automatically updated via the cloud; whereas data recovery in the event of a hard drive crash can be costly, time consuming or not possible at all
- Deployment: If you are migrating to a new software system, then the deployment can often be quicker via the cloud than traditional onsite servers
Cons to cloud hosting
- Internet connection: although it is a positive that all you need is an internet connection to work, if the internet goes down then this can cause real disruption to your business so it is best to have a backup line that you can switch to
- Bandwidth: similarly, if your internet connection has a low bandwidth then you won’t really benefit from the advantages of the cloud and your systems will run quite slowly
- Contracts: some cloud vendors have non-negotiable contracts so it is important to know what you are signing up for
- Security: cloud providers do have security measures in place but it is important to remember that you are allowing a third party company to have access to your company data
Sherlock Taxi can be hosted on-premise or in the cloud. If you would like to find out more, email us at demo@sherlocktaxi.com or call the team on 020 3214 5110.
