Everyone around is talking about the cloud.  You hear others talk about backing up their photos to the cloud.  Or, maybe your colleague mentions that their company doesn’t use shared drives any longer, it’s all in the cloud.  From photos, streaming our television to our business needs, it all seems to be in the cloud or moving to the cloud.  But what the heck is this mysterious cloud?

Before we discuss the clouds of today, let’s first review how we conducted our business before the cloud and how some businesses still operate today.  Companies would have an array of computers or servers to perform multiple functions such as running needed applications, creating websites, and file storage.  This creates a lot of needs in terms of capital and human resources.  All of those computers and servers need to be in a dedicated server room or at a close proximity data center, then connected to the internal network.  IT Teams need to monitor and maintain all of the machines, cables and ancillary equipment.  Additional cooling and ventilation might be needed, continuing upgrades for the hardware and non-stop software upgrades and maintenance all take a toll on the business and its bottom line.

But, now we have the cloud!  And, it isn’t just one cloud, there are multiple clouds.  You can have your own, share with others, have a dedicated portion of someone else’s.  Simply put the cloud is an offsite infrastructure for storage and usage of data such as files, applications, basically anything you would put on your current setup.  Faster Internet speeds allow for computers located anywhere in the world to connect quickly.  Businesses no longer NEED to maintain their own servers and data centers.  Now, they are transforming how the leverage technology, shifting focus to actually running their business and not an IT Department.

OK, my current setup works, so why change?

Everyone wants everything bigger, badder, faster, newer.  So, how do you keep up with these capital costs that seem to be outdated in just months and the experts needed to maintain it all?  Moving to the cloud with onCloud gives you access to all of the “latest and greatest” without having to buy and maintain it.  Let the experts focus on complicated networks, encryption, compliance, redundancy, quickly rerouting data during outages so that everything seems smooth and painless.

onCloud has the ability to be efficient with not only space and human resources, but with power as well.  onCloud’s sophisticated infrastructure, designed with high resiliency, multiple redundancy, equipment succession planning and skilled workforce provides a system where customers receive better service at a fraction of the cost than what businesses can do on their own.

As one customer said, ‘When a storm hit our main office in the northeast, we don’t know what we would have done if we still hosted our IT locally.  Our building lost power for days and employees could not report to work.  onCloud simply rerouted our phones in the cloud to ring our satellite office in the south and our remote employees’ phones and our entire national workforce were able to continue our day-to-day business with no interruption because every system stayed available in the cloud.  Our lost revenue from an outage of that magnitude would have exceeded several years’ IT budget.’