What Types of Companies Benefit From The Cloud?

The cloud has become an enigma in the digital era. Businesses understand it's the new buzzword of the 21st century, but often fail to mentally grasp all of its components at first mention.

This thinking leads to startling discoveries, like an IBM survey conducted in 2010 that found out of 1,500 CEOs, nearly four in every five felt a complex shift in IT strategy was rapidly approaching, but less than half had little confidence in how to deal with it.

Truth is, the cloud isn't that difficult to understand, and in the context of an industrial basis its purpose becomes even easier to see.

Health care
First let's start with health care, which is well known to be undergoing digitization. Being able to see a doctor on a webcam for a small malady is a welcome change from having to stick around a waiting room for long stretches of time, as well as the ability to obtain medical records from anywhere in the world at the click of a button.

Unfortunately, many organizations still operate within a physical IT infrastructure that bottlenecks their abilities and response times. The cloud offers quick and unfettered access to health care records, allowing patients to see doctors in different regions while knowing the professional has a solid understanding of their medical history. IBM reported the cloud allows these organizations to better manage relationships between themselves and people being treated for medical issues, which is perhaps one of the cloud's greatest benefits as it ushers in a more responsive industry.

The cloud allows patients and doctors to collaborate with ease.

Hotels
Running a multinational string of hotels is no easy task. Each chain needs to constantly share information with each other in an effort to keep client records up-to-date, while at the same time facilitating day-to-day tasks like visitors ordering food, setting wake up calls or checking out. According to Business.com, many of these organizations arerunning on antiquated IT infrastructure, which makes constantly fielding digital inquiries an unenviable task.

Sure, these organizations could build their own applications that allow them to share information much easier, but a Microsoft study reported just one-tenth of the average IT budget is devoted to new projects, while the rest is spent solely on maintenance. This makes it difficult for even the largest of businesses to build a cost-effective proprietary file sharing system.

The cloud offers easy access no matter where a hotel is, as long as its connected to the internet. Rather than laboriously requesting FTP access for client files, hotels can easily collaborate and share visitor files, allow them to order room service and other amenities from a tablet and operate at a much more efficient pace. Localizing requests to the cloud, rather than through multiple physical instances, maintains a speedy workflow.

Manufacturing and logistics
These two industries are nearly one in the same when it comes to the reasons why cloud would be a good fit. Both operate at an incredible pace, with the main goal of sustaining high levels of productivity uptime, while also improving razor-thin margins through any means possible.

A Forbes' contributor reported that a cloud-based setup allows these organizations to share important informationthat could improve processes at the blink of an eye. Many of these companies are turning to analytics as a way to work smarter, rather than harder, and they're finding there are limitations to legacy infrastructure—mainly surrounding workflow efficiency, ease of collaboration and data analytics capabilities.

While any number of businesses can benefit from a cloud-based infrastructure, these industries may experience the most rapid and impactful change due to their innate requirement for fast processing speeds and constant resource sharing. Looking to upgrade your company's IT ability? Technologent can help organizations navigate even the most complex environment as they roll out the IT upgrade that will ultimately revolutionize their business.