Is now the time to move to a cloud construction solution? - Global Construction Review
Christa Richardson, COINS, Sponsored
COINS technical services expert, Christa Richardson, outlines five key benefits of moving from an on-premise based IT system to a cloud-hosted construction IT system. They include doing away with hardware costs, preparing better for disasters, greater agility and freeing your people up to focus on business strategy, not computing infrastructure.
No more hardware replacement costs
Hardware replacement costs and server maintenance can be expensive, not to mention the technical support time and effort to maintain that equipment. And although it might be difficult to directly compare the costs of running infrastructure in the cloud to traditional on-premise deployments, the bottom line is that a cloud hosted solution will offer options that would not only be very expensive to replicate with on-premise equipment, but also, in some cases, prove difficult or unfeasible, especially for smaller organisations. Â
A cloud-hosted solution converts traditional technology capital expenses into an operational expense, eliminating server and related equipment purchases, and boosting your construction companies cash flow flexibility.
Disaster recovery planning has always been a critical component to business continuity. To best prepare for disaster recovery, cloud-hosted solutions offer features that guarantee minimal data loss in the event of a data centre failure, minimising the risks associated with on-premise systems.
There is growing demand for flexibility, agility and automation where users need faster computing performance and scalable resources.
BMC notes that "from a business perspective, organizations are focusing on agility and automation as a means to facilitate faster time to value, so they are migrating mission critical IT workloads to the cloud to address those business demands. Unlike traditional datacenter infrastructure that limits these capabilities, the public cloud model such as Microsoft Azure offers the flexibility to scale infrastructure resources on-demand."Â
The power of virtualisation makes it easy to scale your construction solution as you grow. For instance, if you are adding more users or have acquired new businesses, the system takes care of increasing horsepower and resources on the server. Gone are the days of being limited by the physical server equipment size or capabilities.
Cloud hosting for your construction solution will relieve your IT team from the everyday burden of system administration tasks.
Wave goodbye to the days of worrying about installing fixes or service packs, performing non-live environment refreshes, database tuning, version upgrades, backup monitoring, disaster recovery and server maintenance. Â
The system can manage all of this while continually monitoring the server and databases for maximum availability – services that will the workload load on your IT team, allowing them time to focus on strategic business goals.
Security is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, especially amid headlines of major organisations suffering from hacked services and networks.Â
Some companies believe that having physical control of their servers is safer, while others see that security is more stringent with Microsoft Azure Cloud offerings. Â
Regardless of where your company might stand on that debate, when it comes to security, Gartner’s forecast highlights the shifting focus toward cloud solutions to run mission-critical security and performance sensitive IT workloads.
The cloud industry is proving that on-premise datacentre systems don’t automatically translate into stronger security and that cloud computing now offers a secure alternative. COINS is hosted on Microsoft Azure, which is trusted by global companies, governments and start-ups alike.
Christa Richardson is technical services expert at COINS, a member of GCR’s global content partner network.
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