How to avoid liquidation and continue business development in a crisis? If earlier this question overtook every 4-8 years, now it is necessary to look for answers more often. For example, the pandemic that broke out in 2020 showed that during an economic downturn, it is worth starting not with saving resources, but with their efficient distribution. And it is even better to think over an anti-crisis plan, which, in case of emergency, can help out. Then they were not ready for this, but the IT sphere came to the rescue. Today we will talk about the tools that remain relevant today. Let’s look into the “cloudy” future.
How cloud services help businesses
Who was using Zoom before the pandemic? Statistics show that at the beginning of March the number of users was 14 million, but by the end of May we were almost 200 million. Zoom is still in demand among corporate clients and just for personal meetings. The ability to increase capacity helped to cope with such a sharp influx of visitors. The company itself did not wait for the crisis and switched to cloud platforms in 2011. And in the midst of the international crisis, the net profit of the owners increased by 17 times.
Also there was a question with storage of the information. Many preferred hard drives, flash drives and other media that can be felt physically. When the mass transition to online began, I had to adapt to the new reality. To store unlimited amounts of data, share it with colleagues and be sure of the security of confidential information, they began to use cloud storage for business. And not only for private businesses, but also for state-owned enterprises, including medicine, energy, financial institutions and universities. Everything can be placed in the storage: from tables, textual information to dimensional videos. The latter was especially relevant for schoolchildren and students. By the way, this was useful, because you could listen to the material again and again.
“Cloud” for small and medium business
With virtually everything moving online, it required a complete overhaul of business processes and optimization of the remote workflow format. We noticed that it was more difficult for small businesses, because not everyone had a free budget, formed staff and the opportunity to deviate from the planned plan. Therefore, the main task pursued by IT specialists was not to complicate the organizational structure, but to simplify it as much as possible.
Possibility of choice
The cloud is good because there are no predetermined frameworks. The client chooses exactly what is needed for his needs, and if he does not know what to choose, cloud specialists help. Cloud solutions for business today are offered in the form of LaaS, SaaS, PaaS services. There are a few more, but these are the main ones. These models are interconnected. Through the LaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) service, they provide the infrastructure that is necessary to manage SaaS tools (storage and network resources). PaaS (platform as a service) is a cloud environment provided to developers. This includes the database, operating system, and other tools. Since the platform is monitored by providers, developers can devote their time to creating applications. Any of these models can be modified to suit the needs of the business.
The SaaS model is a ready-made solution for medium-sized businesses with CRM, a portal, and a mail system. Suitable for legal and accounting service providers. If we talk about larger businesses, then more often they stop at IaaS and PaaS. Here you have complete freedom of action to develop your own systems and solutions.
This has many advantages for startups and aspiring entrepreneurs. You never know if an idea will fly or not, but cloud services help companies not lose money. In addition, recently technology companies have begun to offer developed cloud support programs for new projects. World leaders provide grants to young projects with the opportunity to fully use the functionality of cloud services.
The market for IT providers has grown significantly. To be competitive, service is improving before our eyes, large budgets are invested in the modernization of equipment and systems.
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