Cloud Hosting

Cloud-based services are becoming more and more commonplace, and its not hard to see why. The cloud can save companies time, money and frustration and offer more flexibility for employees to access data remotely.

Whether your business is just beginning its cloud journey or looking to upgrade to the latest and greatest cloud solutions, its important to keep up with what industry leaders consider to be must-have services. Thats why we asked a panel of Forbes Technology Council members which cloud-based services they believe every tech department should be using. Their best answers are below.

1. Slack

Though every company has its own specific requirements for services, communication is the key across all departments. Effective communication between employees, ease in sharing documents and files, seamless integration with enterprise applications, and private and public communication channels are key capabilities for efficient business operations that are all provided by Slack. - Sujeeth Kanuganti, Aira Tech Corp.

2. G-Suite

One of the best cloud-based services for productivity and collaboration is G Suite. Were a remote company, and G Suite apps like Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Drive make it easy for our teams to collaborate on projects. We can use it to create and share company documentation as well. Plus, you can get started with G Suite for free, which is great for startups and small businesses. - Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

3. Zoom

The cloud has revolutionized the way businesses operate, and communication is no exception to this. As a tech team thats partially remote, weve gravitated towards Zoom for both video and audio conference calling. It gives us the ability to quickly call meetings, which in turn allows us to operate more efficiently as a unit, no matter how far apart we are from one another. - Marc Fischer, Dogtown Media LLC

4. Expensify

Get rid of those nasty receipts and use Expensify. Its been a lifesaver for us as a company as we continue to grow. You can do everything through the app, even online expenses. Just take a screenshot of a receipt and it automatically uploads it into an expense report. It saves the thousands of hours of time and energy that we were spending on those expense reports. - Christopher Carter, Approyo

5. The Public Cloud

Every IT department is managing a plethora of enterprise applicationsmostly old onesbuilt before public cloud software was available. To be a modern IT group, they should be moving as much as they can to the public cloud. They should use the public cloud to rapidly prototype, experiment with new functionality and add new capabilities like machine learning and analytics to old applications. - Danielle Royston, Optiva Inc.

6. Communications And Help Desk Tools

The key is the word, can. Every time we run the numbers on the cloud for what we currently do and offer, the cloud is always more expensive and the risks of vendor lock-in are huge. Consequently, we look to the cloud when replacing systems or introducing new systems and services. We use the cloud for communications technology, help desk technology and software-development-management tech. - Richard Davis, Katalyst Data Management

7. Services That Support Your Core Capabilities

Your core capabilities should weigh in the most on the decision. The rest should be cloud-basedconsider tradeoffs in latency, availability, modularity, tech availability and maturity, security, and cost. Say you offer a high-throughput, high-volume computation requiring tailored hardware with a non-standard security protocol to support your client offeringsit might be best to handle it on-premise. - Florian Quarr, Exponential AI

8. Employee Communication

Any service that is involved with communicating to employees should be cloud-based and hosted off-site. This way there are no outages related to power or network issues, and it should be safe from disasters and storms. One example is email, but there are of course others. - Seth Wasserman, Menin Hospitality

9. An AOIPs Platform

Every IT department needs to invest in and standardize on an AIOPs platform that automates and quantifies the effectiveness of IT technology from end-to-end. These platforms help automate costly and cumbersome data analysis. They also identify the root cause of issues impacting device performance and security problems by constantly staring at the network from client to cloud and everything in between. - Abe Ankumah, Nyansa

10. Internal Messaging Tools

The one indispensable cloud service today is ad-hoc communications and messaging with products like Slack, Facebook Workplace or Microsoft Teams. These are all software as a service offerings that have become part of many startup and enterprise organizations. If an organization is still using email as their primary intercompany communication mechanism, they need to start moving to one of these productivity tools. - David Torres, Feedme Inc.

11. Cloud SSO And Password Managers

When adopting the cloud, all tech teams should have an identity strategy. Cloud single sign-on systems like Okta, Azure AD or Auth0 are convenient for users to access their cloud services and maintain a point of control for IT. Even when these SSO services are not in use, tech teams should use cloud-based password managers such as LastPass or even the password manager built into Chrome. - Steve Pao, Hillwork, LLC

12. Cloud-Based Linux Servers

If you havent moved your serverssuch as Web hosting, VPN, etc.then you are behind the times. Cloud computing is already very competitive in terms of cost. The flexibility and scalability of a cloud-based Linux server is tremendous, especially when taking into account downtime and practicality. Sometimes cloud-based Linux servers even cost less than their dedicated counterparts. - WaiJe Coler, InfoTracer

13. Digital Data Twins

Tech departments managing a mix of on-premise and off-premise public/private cloud should have an externally located, full cloud-based mirror (digital twin) of all data assets. This is for disaster recovery and business survival purposes, as well as to test the risks and potential of the public and private cloud. Organizing all data for mirroring will itself identify opportunities for efficiency and productivity. - Michael Gurau, Kaiser Associates, Inc.

Here is the original post:
13 Cloud-Based Services Every Tech Department Should Invest In - Forbes