What is ‘Cloud Hosting’?
Cloud hosting is the concept of using another person or organisation’s infrastructure to service your own requirements, generally, this comes in the form of a Cloud Service Provider. Here at Southern Solutions, we utilise many cloud service providers, our most notable being one of the market leaders, Microsoft.
Cloud hosting can include things such as email, hosted applications, services accessed through a website, and remote desktop solutions.
It’s not as scary as you may think.
Many services that you already use may include some cloud features that come at no extra cost. These services will utilise a fully managed and maintained environment that is frequently updated, monitored 24/7 and provided with 99,99% uptime, which is approximately 48 minutes a YEAR.
Businesses get worried about storing their data online, but hosting your services on the cloud should be considered more secure than keeping your data in-house. Take your flat file data, for example. You may store thousands of Word and Excel files on your server. That server may be protected by a basic business firewall which you rarely update and do not subscribe to advanced protection features. Your server is at risk of physical theft, and cyber attacks on your basic and dated firewall will almost certainly get through if given enough time. Microsoft spend millions of dollars a year on their security, and when configured correctly, it can provide a rock-solid solution with almost no chance of your data getting into the wrong hands.
We, by default, enable MFA which requires users to utilise a mobile phone to login to their accounts from a new device. This blocks 99.9% of attacks immediately. We then couple this with conditional access policies to ensure we only allow connections from designated countries. Finally, we place rules on the accounts that will block suspicious activity, even if originated from the UK. Equivalent security hosted in-house would cost thousands of pounds a year.
Total Cost of Ownership
Immediate figures may not indicate a saving, but it’s important to calculate the total cost of ownership savings compared to traditional on-site servers. With energy prices soaring, now may be a good time to get in touch so we can carry out a Cloud Readiness check on your business!
Some savings include:
- No hardware costs
- No warranty extensions needed
- Energy bill reductions
- Office space reductions
Cloud Services typically sit on a subscription basis and use what is called a ‘Consumption Model’ which means you only pay for what you use, we can scale up or scale down depending on your requirements, which will in turn increase or decrease your bill!
How will it benefit my Business?
The main benefits of cloud computing for our customers are:
- The ability to work from any location
- Hardware and energy cost reductions
- Improved collaboration across Microsoft applications
- Improved reliability and speed of accessing your services