Helping your business to do more business
'Why use cloud technology?'
This is a question I get asked quite often now in these evolving days of technology. I hope to give my personal opinion in this blog whether you agree with it or not.
Cloud technology allows you to work more flexibly, whether you are out and about or sat in your office you can have access to all your documents, files, work etc. Rather than have an existing (possibly expensive) server sat in the corner of an office or a dedicated room a lot of the cloud technology is purchased on a subscription basis, based on the number of users. This means that as things change in a business (staff numbers etc) you will only be paying for what you use.
An example of a popular cloud technology is Office365 from Microsoft that we use here at Convallis Software. As the name suggests this is the familiar Office suite of applications but in a cloud environment using secure servers. Another example is our own product, ConvallisCRM, a customer relationship management solution that has a desktop or cloud based option. Most of our customers are now subscribing to the monthly cloud option which allows the flexibility of usage.
In my personal opinion cloud technology is certainly the way to go for a modern business. If you want to find out more how this works please take a look at the following video from Microsoft showing an example of how cloud technology works for a small business in the UK.
Over the past few years we've steadily worked on our CRM and CMS software and have added new features and capabilities to it. However, while we were busy doing that the technologies that the software is built on was itself undergoing changes, some of which we made use of while others we chose to ignore. Fortunately those changes/enhancements usually maintain backwards compatibility with code that's already been written and so it rarely if ever breaks existing code.
We recently took the decision to move our email and document storage solutions to Microsoft Office 365.
The move to offering services through the cloud is showing no sign of losing any momentum at the moment, and why should it, when there are several advantages to be had. With perhaps the most significant of those being is the reduction in cost to be achieved when compared to hosting similar capabilities in your own network.