Cloud Storage

Top 4 reasons why small businesses should move to Cloud

Bobby Varghese

Cloud Technology brings new opportunities and potentially disruptive changes to small businesses. Many small and medium-sized businesses have now realized the changes brought by Cloud Computing. It is estimated that 80% of the small businesses in U.S. will have fully adapted to Cloud Computing by 2020.

Here are the top 4 reasons why you should consider migrating to Cloud:

1. Easier Collaboration: Cloud Computing offers the ability to save and access various files on the Cloud to multiple people. Employees can easily collaborate and work on the same master document with the help of collaboration tools like Google Drive. Employers can also upload their documents and can control what their employees can access. This collaboration also helps the small businesses in improving their efficiency by helping the business owners to track and manage individual performance on assignments.

2. Improved Flexibility: In today’s mobile world, people demand greater flexibility. Cloud Computing allows remote access to the work-related files and information. With the help of Cloud Computing, employees can access work materials when they’re not at work or working from outside of the office. They also have an option to bring their own devices to work which helps in additional cost savings for small businesses.

3. Reduced Expenses: The goal of every business is to cut down the operational costs and to improve the efficiency whenever possible. The greatest benefit of moving to Cloud is that the services are available at a flat-rate monthly fee for users according to their bandwidth requirements without any upfront costs. Also, moving from in-house servers to Cloud servers eliminate the dependability on the IT support staff further reducing the costs and improving the efficiency.

4. Better Integration: Cloud computing enables small businesses to integrate their various departments to make them work in sync with each other so that business owners can put more time to focus on the critical business areas. For example, for an FMCG company, the field sales personnel can update the available stock in the application hosted on Cloud and the production department can procure the raw material for production accordingly.

Overall, there are many benefits of Cloud Computing for small businesses. It is important for every business owner to always look out for the most effective, yet economical solutions possible to gain maximum efficiency.

Are you ready to migrate to Cloud? Contact Sysfore’s Cloud experts for your free in-depth analysis to see how simple and cost effective it is to implement a robust Cloud Backup / Disaster Recovery plan for your Enterprise. Write to us at info@sysfore.com or call us on +91-80-4110-5555 to know more.

Major Cloud Security Challenges concerning the Enterprises

Bobby Varghese

With the increasing breach of sensitive data held in Cloud, many enterprises, medium and large, are now worried about Cloud Security. According to a survey by Clutch, Security was ranked among the top Cloud Computing benefits by 22% of the 300 respondents. Whereas, 31% of the respondents identified security as a major challenge. In this article, we will discuss some of the major Cloud Security Challenges facing the enterprises and whether they can be overcome.

Data Security: Ensuring Data Security while moving to the Cloud can be a difficult task. Data breaches continue to increase at an alarming rate with the increase in Cloud adoption. But, designing and implementing a proper cloud security database structure can help reduce the risk. Transparent and Application level encryption can help protecting the data at file-level or application-level.

Shadow IT: Businesses are evolving quickly and in order to get things done, internal business units are often bypassing IT security controls via Shadow IT without thinking about the vulnerabilities. This poses a serious threat to data security. Enterprises can prevent the leakage of sensitive data by encrypting it and by implementing intelligent key management models like AWS KMS, Microsoft KMS, etc. which allow access control to encrypted data.

Cyber Attacks/Conflicts: With the improvements in technology, the attacks are becoming complex as well. Proper Cloud Encryption tools like nCrypted Cloud, Gemalto SafeNet and Sophos can prevent cyber security attacks and create a safer environment for enterprises. A majority of organizations will agree that Data Encryption is one of the best things they can do to reduce the risk of cyber-attacks.

Compliance Issues with CSPs: Enterprises are concerned with the lack of control over the location of data, vulnerabilities from shared infrastructure, and privileged user abuse at the Service Provider. They want their CSPs to help them in data security, data protection, and data management issues. But, most of the service providers are not ready to address the major security challenge that concerns the enterprises. The service providers should take a note that even though they meet the compliance standards for data privacy like ISO 27001, PCI DSS, etc., they still need to take into account the security needs of enterprises to continue doing business.

Final Thoughts: Cloud security challenges are not insuperable. In order to overcome these challenges, enterprises and service providers need to follow the best security practices such as encrypting their data, employing strong authentication and access controls, and keeping a track of new vulnerabilities and attacks on a regular basis.

Hadoop and Big Data Analytics

Shantha Kumari

Gartner defines Big Data as “high volume, velocity and variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making”.

Big data is data that, by virtue of its velocity, volume, or variety (the three Vs), cannot be easily stored or analyzed with traditional methods.

Big Data Characteristics

The term covers each and every piece of data your organization has stored till now. It includes all the data stored both on-premises or in the cloud. It could be papers, digital, structured and non-structured data within your company.
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