Benefits of cloud for digital business

(1)  New revenue streams and eCommerce options

The pandemic changed more than how we work. It changed the buying behaviours of our customers. With $790 billion spend on e-commerce in the US alone, and e-commerce attributing to over $36 billion of revenue in Australia during 2020.

With customers adapting to more online buying interactions, business needs to move online to align with customer demands.

When used correctly, cloud technology provides business owners with a clear competitive advantage. Including:

• Allowing you to build innovative platforms to boost buyer power
• Providing a means to gather and analyse your corporate data to remain competitive
• Streamlining your supply chain
• Building your brand reputation on a national (or global) stage

You also need a secure infrastructure to protect your business from the well-documented digital threats that could undermine all your hard work. What’s more, you need a cost-effective technical solution, and one that will deliver value whilst helping to scale your business.

A comprehensive suite of cloud computing services helps power and grow a business allowing it to develop new revenue streams and eCommerce options.

(2)  Increased scalability and flexibility

Cloud not only enables you to adapt to flexible and hybrid ways of working more easily, it also enables you to scale up and down as your needs develop or change. In turn, allowing you to save money and gain agility as a result.

By transitioning to the cloud as part of a fully outsourced or co-managed solution, you will be able to access a wider range of solutions to empower your business. We can also help you find the right cloud to on-premise mix for your business.

Working with cloud partners like Alibaba Cloud, we can also help you find the right blend of public, private and hybrid cloud models – giving you true flexibility and scalability of your storage and solutions. This allows you to move to the services you need as demands change, as well as scale up or down your activity when you need to (and fast).

(3)  Better security and compliance

While there is still a stigma that cloud is ‘not as safe’, cloud solutions offer heightened security and control of your data.

Cloud storage providers encrypt your data before it’s transferred to the cloud. On the cloud, encryption may range from encrypted connections to limited encryption of specific data (like account credentials) to full end-to-end encryption of all data uploaded to the cloud.

As well as encryption, cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud offer measures such as Web Application Firewalls (WAF). WAF protects your core business data and prevents server malfunctions caused by malicious activities and attacks and helps prevent bot, hit and HTTP flood attacks. A robust IT security strategy will also ensure your business can respond, react and restart as quickly as possible, without impacting your business or customers.

Working in the cloud also brings levels of compliance and document control, with files accessed more easily and from anywhere. Bringing more transparency around document sharing, storing and editing. Leading to greater document control and compliance, and in turn decreasing document related risk.

If data sovereignty compliance and regulation is a key concern for your business, it’s important to choose a cloud service provider like Alibaba Cloud that has local datacentres to keep your data on shore or in locations you choose.

(4)  Enhanced business continuity, disaster recovery and data-backup

Data is a critical cornerstone of all organisations and as the volume of data grows each year, managing this data increase becomes a crucial to the success (or failure) of any business.

As we deal with terabytes of data in our day-to-day work, every day work becomes increasingly difficult. Especially when retrieving the data in a timely manner in the event of any issues.

With this in mind – and facing a continuous explosion of data volume, the deep mining of data value, and the rising storage costs – cloud services such as Alibaba Cloud provide a range of storage, archive and back-up solutions to help you properly plan and execute:

• Highly available and durable data backup
• Low-cost and high-performance data archiving
• Secure and compliant storage-level disaster recovery.

Cloud backups and archive storage also gives you longer backup retention, allowing you to align with compliance requirements and giving you offsite digital storage to ensure you are ready when disaster strikes.