The Benefits of Moving to Cloud Services

June 19, 2013

Adopting cloud services is a great way to decrease your organization’s overall cash outlay for IT investments, but did you know that cloud services offer many more benefits? Here are just a few ways that our Konica Minolta and All Covered customers are leveraging cloud services.

Access to Data

In today’s fast-paced business environment, access to business data is critical. Whether you are traveling, away from your desk or visiting a customer, you need access to your data. But what if your servers or network go down? What if you are moving offices and need to move your servers? This was the exact challenge for one All Covered, Konica Minolta customer – they didn’t want to lose access to their data (even for a short time) while they moved office locations. By moving their critical IT services to All Covered Cloud Services, the company could access all their data while our technical staff physically moved and set up their IT systems in the new location. More important, by moving data to the cloud, the organization continued to benefit from affordable, scalable All Covered Cloud Services with 99.995% uptime.

Decreased Upfront Costs

Organizations that have multiple locations can be saddled with huge upfront costs when it is time to replace aging servers and other hardware. We recently worked with a community bank with five branch locations that had aging servers housed in one location. If the power went down at the server location, all five branches would lose access to business-critical data and services. The bank wanted to replace its servers and switches and invest in a generator but was shocked to learn that the upfront costs were over $300,000. Instead, the bank moved its systems to All Covered Cloud Servers eliminating the hefty upfront costs for an affordable monthly fee of approximately $5,000. Not only is their data available across all their branches, but they have been able to reallocate IT resources from maintaining servers to other mission-critical projects. Mobility With most business users owning a smartphone, tablet computer and/or a laptop, employees are less likely to be tied to the office, taking their jobs on the road. Unfortunately, mobility solutions often come at the price of data inaccessibility and increased security risks.

A top-tier compensation and benefits company with five offices and staff that are constantly on the road asked us for help providing its workers with secure access to sensitive data with maximized uptime. The company looked at possible solutions from Amazon Cloud Services and Rackspace but determined these services could not adequately support apps that ran on custom plugins. All Covered Cloud services support customized plugins while providing the security and guaranteed uptime required by their users. Now their workers have access to sensitive data and apps from computers, smartphones, iPads and other tablets.

Security and Disaster Recovery

Many organizations face government regulations regarding how they must protect sensitive data. This is especially true for one of our healthcare customers who moved to our cloud backup solution. The customer, a hospice organization that employs almost 100 employees from multiple locations in the Eastern United States, handles sensitive HIPAA-regulated data on a daily basis.

They needed to ensure that data was always secure and available to staff regardless of where they worked and traveled. Due to severe weather in the recent past, the organization was updating its disaster planning and recovery procedure and wanted to make sure that access to data would not be affected by any local weather conditions or a natural disaster. With multiple data centers throughout the country, All Covered Cloud Services ensure that sensitive data is protected (SAS 70 type II compliant) and available to its employees anywhere, anytime. In fact, when Super Storm Sandy hit the East Coast, the hospice’s data, services, and uptime were not affected.

Guaranteed Uptime

Business continuity or uptime is one of the biggest benefits of cloud servers. If systems go down, so does business productivity. To improve system uptime, a major transportation company with a reputation for making timely deliveries, moved to All Covered Cloud Services and saw a significant improvement in their delivery time due to maximized uptime of their GPS systems and the ability to reroute drivers due to road and traffic conditions. They have kept existing clients and gained new clients due to their ability to deliver products more efficiently than their competitors. In addition, the company has also leveraged the power of the cloud to host its billing services, client information, and other tasks.

Endless Benefits

Each day we see customers using the cloud in new and exciting ways to improve their business and remain competitive. When evaluating the cloud, it’s important to remember that the benefits go beyond cost or resource savings to improve information access and productivity.

If you are looking to move to the cloud or thinking about making new technology investments, contact All Covered to see how you might benefit from our Cloud Server Solutions.

Nick Pegley
Senior Vice President, Channel Sales Engagement

Nick is responsible for global go-to-market strategies for the Konica Minolta Digital Workplace business unit, with a primary focus on the innovative new Workplace Hub portfolio. His team builds new business strategies and channel models to be able to bring solutions to a broad range of customer types, to help them simplify their IT. Nick is focused on helping companies achieve their business goals through better management of information and more effective collaboration. Nick has lived and worked in the UK, Switzerland, France and the US.