If business technology management seems more complex than the business technology solutions you use, cloud computing may hold the answer to simpler oversight. Challenging technology and the challenges faced while managing it are different, but the latter impacts the performance of the former. When technology underperforms, optimizing its management with the cloud, not replacement solutions, could be the key to realigning results with expectations.
If your business hasn’t migrated to a cloud, improved technology management could be a reason to make the shift. NIC can simplify your migration by remotely hosting your cloud, and providing additional cloud services for optimization. To learn how a custom cloud solution could benefit your business’s technology management, schedule a free consultation today.
Solving Challenges: Step One May be Migration
The primary facilitator of cloud migration is server virtualization, which partially or fully moves the operation of physical servers to a web server. The web server is the platform for a virtual cloud server, with the option to run multiple cloud servers concurrently. The cloud enhances processes and programs that the physical servers performed and facilitated, including improved operation and availability of business technology management applications.
Cloud servers offer benefits that physical servers simply don’t, including remote collaboration with unlimited users and automated, remote data storage that supports IT disaster recovery. After migration is complete and strong cyber security is enabled, immediate benefits include:
- Remote server access from extended internet terminals
- Encrypted data protection with unbreached algorithms
- More secure data sharing through shared cloud access
- Reduced server vulnerability to disastrous events
- Reduced server vulnerability to hardware weaknesses
- Increased collaboration through shared cloud access
Beyond the basic elements of cloud operation, cloud performance is defined by the cloud capacities your business requires, and how seamlessly they align with those requirements. NIC can present an itemized list of cloud features that meet your business technology management needs. Among many other challenges, our cloud can help you address:
1. Servers: Fiscal Cutback, Added Security
Virtual servers create room in your business space and your IT budget for business technology solutions. Eliminating the fiscal liability of physical servers that flicker with indicator lights — especially critical data units — can lead to preserving less financial leverage for contingency plans. For companies that harbor a corridor of server enclosures, canceling the cost of server maintenance and replacement can create compelling cost savings, too.
In addition to encrypted cloud data being difficult to hack, the virtual domain is safe from physical unknowns. The cloud also enables safer data sharing. With “safe sharing”, document read access is granted to others through the cloud, removing the need to share files or thumb drives. Ensuring server security in a new space can be a business technology management challenge for companies that change business locations or data centers. The cloud helps solve it.
2. Preferred Positioning of IT Business Data
In the modern business era, business data has always been an essential resource for success, but the proliferation of data-driven business technology solutions has made it more so than ever. A business that increasingly adopts data-driven solutions creates a new business process, where the central access position for data is increasingly important.
For some entities, the location of central data storage, in relation to headquarters, is pivotal to business opportunity. The concern is especially relevant for global businesses, as some chief intelligence officers (CIOs) will only work with a company that controls data from a location that shares nationality with company headquarters. Data storage is a variable of success.
Storing data that powers your business technology solutions within the same country that your company calls home, while offering efficient access to your international offices, is a refined business technology management need that the cloud can easily solve. If you operate globally, the cloud could help nurture opportunities in the place where you probably started out, and consider the most familiar of business territories: your national home base.
3. Securely Storing Business-Critical Information
Regardless of your ideal location for data storage, storing the information securely is the primary concern. Rendering data equally storable and accessible to the most reliable degree is a business technology management challenge that the cloud seems designed to solve.
Among companies that haven’t migrated to the cloud, fear that cloud-stored data is less secure than data housed in “bare metal” servers remains a concern. However, as cloud providers often reiterate, the widespread adoption of cloud technology literally forces providers to off elite protection to maintain a competitive advantage. If cloud security were weak, cloud-sourced data theft would be endemic to nearly all IT business contexts.
One of the primary protections is data encryption, using a robust protocol such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Another form of protection is inherent to the cloud itself: because cloud servers are virtual, they aren’t subject to hardware vulnerabilities. Secure data storage is a business technology management challenge the cloud helps solve, improving security through the elimination of vulnerabilities that are native to physical servers.
4. Economical Disaster Recovery Preparedness
Business continuity in the wake of disasters is synonymous with continuous data access, making offsite data storage critical for creating actionable recovery plans. Remote data storage, received as service from the recovery plan provider, meets the need. If the provider offers cloud hosting, using a remote cloud as a primary server solution that doubles as a data storage option is an alternative. If it condenses data storage, it can reduce storage cost.
Disaster recovery planning is a proactive investment that companies ultimately hope to never use. Consequently, a plan that is economical in the present, without sacrificing future security, is always a goal. Because preliminary service cost is a also factor for initially investing in recovery planning, a remote cloud can be a business technology management resource that helps facilitate both the adoption of a plan and the plan’s execution, if it needs to be deployed.
Explore Cloud Management at NIC
Beyond the universal benefits of cloud computing, a cloud-based solution for a business technology management challenge is a customized approach to four elements of your system of technology management, and how they interrelate to create its standard of quality:
- The management process (i.e., resources implemented and response protocols)
- Business technology solutions you manage
- Management requirements and goals
- Challenges due to how these elements currently align
Customization also reflects whether challenges are periodic or persistent, their known effects and potential effects on other elements of IT, and any new IT issues that the cloud-based solution entails. Whether the solution involves full cloud migration, partial cloud migration, or optimizing a current cloud configuration, NIC can be your single business technology management source for cloud information, implementation, and ongoing service needs.
Schedule a Free Consultation Today
To learn how cloud computing can help you manage challenging business technologies, without challenges in management that consume time, cause stress, and potentially undermine how technologies perform, contact NIC today to schedule a free consultation.
