Recent world events have greatly increased the adoption of Cloud computing infrastructure and many different sectors have widely adopted the technology. For example the care sector is undergoing a wide-ranging digital transformation aimed at delivering better care and information sharing between the NHS and social care services. Cloud based IT infrastructure and communications supports this process but these benefits are not only relevant to the care sector. So the questions is: how does the cloud help care providers ?

There are a wide range of benefits of Cloud computing, for example:

1. Reduced IT costs – Although there is a cost involved in the initial switch to the Cloud, the ongoing cost savings it provides are a strong driver for most organisations. No more system upgrades, reduced hardware costs, reduced IT Support costs, reduced energy bills are all likely savings you will benefit from. With a pay as you go model you don’t have to buy what you’re not using.
2. Scalability – As well as the cost savings mentioned, scalability means you can rapidly react to increase or decrease the resources you need for business growth or seasonal increases and decreases. Many businesses have peak periods and the Cloud will allow you to deal with this far more effectively than fixed IT infrastructure.
3. Business Continuity – Vitally important to all organisations, ensuring business continuity means having essential backups in place to minimise any potential downtime caused by hardware or software failures. The Cloud allows you to create multiple backups, in many different locations, and to quickly switch between them if and when required.
4. Collaboration efficiency – As we have clearly seen during the recent crisis, the ability to collaborate efficiently while being located in many places, means the whole team requires access to the same updated files in a central location. Changes made in one place can be seen instantly by all. A Cloud based system provides this for you.
5. Flexibility – and alongside this ability to collaborate, your team can now work Anywhere, not just in one country but spread across the world if required. In addition they can move from home to office or another location and not lose access to key operating systems and data.
6. Automatic updates – Remember how big an event a system or application software update used to be? Entire departments taken offline while their software was updated. With the Cloud software updates are implemented without downtime and quite often without the users even knowing an update has taken place. This means important security patches for example can be implemented more or less instantly across your entire network.
7. Cyber Security – Every day there seems to be a new report of some kind of hacking taking place. Generally cyber security is more stringently managed by Cloud providers as they have a greater concentration of resources available to them than many businesses.
8. Sustainability – Although all IT equipment and systems come with some form of carbon footprint, Cloud based systems provide greater efficiencies in areas such as hardware by providing for example virtual servers rather than physical products. They also help in operating costs by reducing paper usage, reducing unnecessary travel and improving energy efficiency.

All organisations are different and there is no one size fits all solution, but an audit of your current systems would allow us to estimate cost savings for any part or full switch to the Cloud. We can look at your IT infrastructure now and discuss a pathway for accessing these significant benefits.

We can also advise on how to obtain a cost-effective HSCN connection if you need one and what the differences are between that and the old N3 system.

Please drop us a line and we will be happy to help.