Cloud storage is quickly becoming a part of everyday life. Almost everyone takes advantage of the cloud in some way. Maybe you stream your movies from Netflix or your TV shows from Hulu. Perhaps you store your pictures on Instagram or post your daily thoughts on a blog service.
The above are examples of the cloud for personal use. But what about using a cloud service for work? Or specifically, the public sector data storage needs? There are several advantages to allowing a cloud service to replace or supplement the storage that the local hard disk provides. This blog post will cover some of the most important ones specifically for the public sector from municipalities to school districts or school boards and to hospital boards and more.
Work From Anywhere
Data portability is perhaps the most well-known advantage of cloud data. With local storage, when you want to work on a file, you are bound to the computer that you started working with it on. This may be minimized by the use of external storage, but you still must have that device with you in order to access your files.
Saving your data in the cloud eliminates this issue. Wherever you have access to a computer with Internet connection, you will have access to your files. You can view and modify them on whatever computer you have available to you, and they will be there with all the changes intact when you return to your primary computing device.
No Physical Drives
With local storage, when you run out of space on your internal hard drive, you must buy another drive to expand. If you use large amounts of data, which isn’t hard to do these days, then you could end up needing several drives to store it all. This takes up extra space on your desk and reduces the portability of devices like laptops by tethering them to another device.
With cloud storage, expanding your data storage is simply a matter of upgrading your plan with the cloud storage provider. You can have all of the storage you need, with none of the clutter of physical drives.
Cost
Besides slashing the cost stemming from using physical devices, Cloud also reduces the cost of other resources. For instance, manpower. An organization doesn’t need a lot of IT resources to make sure the Cloud is working as expected. If there is any troubleshooting or fixing to do, the organization can just give a call to the provider who will already have an expert maintenance support team. Before choosing a cloud service, ask around to see if they offer great customer service.
No Data Loss
Prevention of data loss is another well-known advantage of storing data in the cloud. With local physical drives, your data is only as safe as the drive that holds it. If a natural disaster destroys the drive, the drive fails due to age, the computer that houses the drive develops problems that prevent you from accessing it, or any other issue compromises your access to that drive, then you have no access to your data.
Cloud storage eliminates this issue. Keeping your data safe is the bread and butter of the company that is storing it. Disaster striking your hardware no longer means that you lose all of your important information. Using the cloud, your data is also protected from natural disasters which cannot be avoided.
Collaboration
With local storage, collaborating with others can be a pain. Small files can be sent via email, but larger files can be a challenge. This makes it more difficult to share something with your team or get feedback on something that you are working on. If you want to actively collaborate with a colleague on a project, it is hard to do so with local storage.
Cloud storage solves this problem. It is easy to share a single file by sending a colleague a link to it or to share an entire folder that you both can modify for more advanced collaboration. Editing is made easy and you can use check-in and check-out functions for version control. Documents are more accessible to you and your team no matter where you physically are.
Works On Any Device
If you have several types of devices in your organization or department, then you know that compatibility can be a nightmare. An external drive formatted for your Macintosh might not be read on your Windows computer without additional software. And there’s no way to easily access that data on a mobile device or tablet. Keeping your data in the cloud makes it accessible to all of your devices, all of the time.
Conclusion
Humans are social and collaborative creatures, with the cloud, our work can be as well. Digital transformation is happening in all aspects of our lives, including the daily paperwork grind. With the right partner, your organization can easily step into a digital future too!