Cloud Hosting

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) Cloud computing has definitely proven to be a worthy investment and a seemingly inevitable way forward for businesses to ensure longevity.

The pandemic has proven how efficient it is for companies forced to shut down office operations and suddenly migrate to work-from-home arrangements due to the local COVID-19 outbreak. Early migrators found their investment working to their advantage.

Businesses count heavily on proactive and extensive planning for stability, and enterprise decision-makers should know, that cloud solutions are a viable and cost-efficient option towards digitalization.

"It's quite affordable in the sense of scalability," Globe Business Senior Vice President Peter Maquera told CNN Philippines' The Exchange with Rico Hizon. "Whether you're one user or 10,000 users, you only pay for what you need. In the old world, you would buy in advance a lot of hardware and over-capacitize. It's a huge difference, since [the Cloud is] much more optimal in the way you operate."

What used to require spacious, airconditioned rooms for costly servers or even old-school filing cabinets for storage can be replaced by a virtual space that carries virtually no weight nor real estate for an agile office.

"Things that used to take six months, we can literally do in minutes," Maquera said. "We are much more careful when we deploy, but you really just reduce your time to market quite significantly."

Jared Reimer, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Cascadeo, also set the record straight about cybersecurity fears on the cloud.

"Fundamentally, cloud computing is inherently more secure than conventional corporate IT," Reimer explained. "The companies that you are building on in the States, that would be Google, Microsoft, and Amazon they are some of the largest, most powerful technology companies on the planet. They have effectively unlimited resources, the best expertise, infrastructure, software."

"You're basically standing on the shoulders of the giants," he added. "If you do cloud incorrectly meaning bad architecture, bad operations, it can cause a disaster just as is the case in a traditional data center... But if you do it right, it's vastly superior."

Cascadeo is Globe Business' partner in cloud consulting and managed services. Reimer took the now-popular video conferencing platform Zoom as an example of cloud technology as an enabler.

During the first quarter of 2020, Zooms users increased from 10 million in December of last year to 300 million daily since the pandemic. Zoom, being hosted on the cloud, allows people to use it simultaneously, regardless of how many users there are. Without the cloud, companies like Zoom would have to build or buy physical infrastructure, new servers, hire manpower, all of which would have taken years to do so.

Cloud solutions also spell a definitive step toward the future of business a virtual space where people can easily collaborate, keep documents, strengthen relationships, and streamline operations in a world of surging digital transactions and e-commerce.

"If you are going to build data analytics infrastructure and get good at artificial intelligence and machine learning which are must-haves in the future for most businesses building those on a cloud platform is really important," Reimer said. "When you combine 5G, the Internet of Things, data from anything and anywhere all the time, you get a business advantage that in the future which I think you can't live without."

"The sooner you begin this process, the more likely you are to be competitive in a post-pandemic world..." he added. "These changes are going to stick. Getting good at this stuff now is an imperative for almost every company."

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No way to go but up as cloud solutions shape the future of business - CNN Philippines