Today we’re going to talk about why the cloud is great. It’s convenient, safe, and probably better than whatever you’ve got going on now. Even companies with the world to lose have come to the conclusion that “yeah, the cloud is the best way to achieve our goals.” Most people who object to the cloud have something to say about purported security vulnerabilities. If it feels like we’ve had this conversation before, it’s because we have. A couple of times, actually.
Mistakes happen
Again, it feels a little strange to write about the advantages of cloud backup in 2016. Didn’t we all more or less agree five years ago that our photos, office docs, etc. were more difficult to lose in the cloud than they were in an external hard drive on your desk? It turns out that we didn’t all agree on that. People lose their kids’ baby photos thanks to a bad HDD all the time. People also accidentally delete their entire company, too. The cloud may seem scary, but your IP isn’t going anywhere.
GE and Autodesk are on the cloud
Still need convincing? Would it help if I described how a few of the world’s most innovative companies use the cloud? You got it.
GE moving 9,000 apps to the public cloud - In October of last year, GE started to move 9,000 apps to the public cloud. They made the decision for quite a few reasons, “challenges of demand spikes without sufficient capacity” not least among them. “We had the desire to burst out to external cloud to solve these problems by leveraging a hybrid cloud. However, if we were able to burst out to the external cloud to support our applications then why were we running the applications internally at all?” Why indeed?
Autodesk’s transition to SaaS - Autodesk is transitioning from on premises perpetual (desktop) licenses to a SaaS based model. Autodesk is transitioning its flagship product to the cloud. Let that sink in for a minute.
So what, specifically, does the cloud have going for it?
Faster software updates, your data is safely secured and backed up, and you don’t need on premise hardware and the costs/headaches that come with it.
Let’s take them one at a time:
Faster software updates – When a new feature goes live or a bug is fixed, cloud solutions can update automatically. No waiting around to download stuff, install stuff, restart stuff, and so on. Faster is better.
Data safely secured and backed up – You don’t have to worry about a folder being deleted or losing an older version of a design. And you don’t need to rely on IT to help you access or retrieve your work – the cloud solution provider is already taking care of that for you in the background. Is the cloud safe? It’s at least as safe as whatever on premise solution you’ve got now. Anyway, as I mentioned we’ve talked about this. The cloud just plain isn’t as scary as some people think.
You don’t need on-premise headaches – Imagine never again having to talk to IT about needing more capacity and more resources. Instead, you can tell them that you’ve freed them up to do less integration and maintenance. A cloud solution will handle all of this for you quietly in the background.
Makes sense, right? Great.
The feedback on these little notes has been great. Thanks so much for the kind words. We’re so close to telling you what we’ve been up to. And we’re just as excited as you are.
Sit tight. It’s worth it.
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