When your business invests in certain services which are claimed to come with serious benefits, it can take a while for the impact to actually be felt. But with cloud computing you will quickly be able to see the transformative effect it has within a short period of time.
The cloud has the power to transform a number of areas of your business, so here are just a few of the chief changes that it will instigate.
Liberation of IT resources
If you are heavily reliant on an internal IT system, you will almost certainly have to dedicate a lot of your resources to maintaining it, even if the time and efforts of employees might be better expended elsewhere in the organisation.
By migrating to the cloud and allowing a third party provider to account for most of the biggest responsibilities, a business can free up IT resources and enable staff to focus their attentions elsewhere.
Budgetary benefits
The liberation of IT resources leads directly into a more cost-effective approach to enterprise computing, because with the cloud on tap you may not need to have such a large IT department, allowing you to save money on staffing.
Productivity can also increase thanks to the cloud, which means that each penny the company invests in employing skilled workers will be going further towards enhancing growth and driving innovation. Savings can also be made on hardware, because with the cloud you have an on-demand infrastructure available and you are no longer required to procure and install complicated equipment internally.
Being able to break free of the constant cycle of procurement, maintenance and upgrade by making the leap to the cloud can give a business far more budgetary freedom, either to save money for a rainy day or invest it in other areas to see bigger returns.
Performance boost
Just because cloud computing can be more affordable than on-site IT does not mean that it is any less effective in dealing with the capacity requirements of a business. In fact the opposite is true, since cloud providers can give businesses unrestricted access to storage and processing capacity.
The limitations that are intrinsic to on-site hardware will melt away when you adopt a cloud solution, allowing you to channel vital data and harness mission-critical apps in this environment without having to worry about whether you have enough terabytes of storage or CPU clock cycles to handle the workload.
A business needs to be responsible and agile in the modern marketplace, so with the improvements to performance associated with the cloud, IT can be a tool for growth once more.
Increased flexibility
On-site IT is only as flexible as the resources of the business that is running it, because adding to the infrastructure costs cold, hard cash and needs adequate people power to keep it ticking over. In the cloud, this kind of scalability can be accessed without the same level of spending, because a remotely hosted service is not constrained by such considerations.
When capacity requirements leap upwards, a cloud service will accommodate them at their peak. Then when they waver or sink, for whatever reason, the cloud service will flex to address the drop-off in usage. This gives businesses the opportunity to avoid the expense of sustaining an internal setup which is only used at full capacity on rare occasions, once more adding to the cost-effectiveness of cloud computing.
Many of the transformations which the cloud causes within a company will occur speedily and be apparent to even casual observers, while others run deeper and are still as important, which is why so many companies are choosing to adopt.
Even without the puiblc cloud we are already seeing examples of patients data being shared across different health care providers. In many if not most cases this is exactly what you want to have happen but patients aren’t yet aware that if one provider buys their EHR from another local hospital system that their entire medical record has just been shared with all of the providers (who have a need to know) in the system. An example in Seattle recently involved a young woman who went outside of her insurance plan and paid out of pocket for a confidential GYN procedure at a small community clinic. When she returned to her primary care provider she was asked about what she thought had been a confidential surgery. The community clinic however was part of Swedish medical center which sold their EHR to the Polyclinic so the records were shared. Was their informed consent? Perhaps but clearly the patient wasn’t aware that this would happen and felt vulnerable.