Quick Poll: How Does Your Company Use the Cloud?

There are many substantial benefits to moving IT functions to the cloud. Cloud providers can achieve economy of scale that both small and midsize businesses cannot, offering services for much less than what they cost a small business.

A cloud provider’s large data center can have redundancy and higher-speed Internet connections than many businesses couldn’t afford to run internally, yielding higher performance for applications. The capability to easily increase or reduce capacity or features can make an organization more agile. The cloud also enables the creation of virtual companies, so you can use contractors for IT functions.

On the downside, cloud provider outages, hacking, or loss of data can cause employees to lose work hours–and lead to large financial losses if customer data is exposed, competitors get hold of proprietary data, or data is permanently lost.

Are the potential hazards worth the savings? Let us know what you think.

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