Today, businesses and companies and organizations are not required to have large and wasteful server rooms in the Agon offices, rather, they can use cloud services for their computing operations. Our company offers a variety of cloud services at affordable prices that can fulfill all the computing needs of the organization.

What are cloud services for businesses?

Cloud services are actually a copy of physical server operations to servers that are located in a place far from the organization’s offices. Thus, instead of an organization purchasing servers and allocating large real estate areas in order to carry out its computing operations and maintain an internal network, cloud services make it possible to copy this activity to a remote location.

Cloud services have revolutionized the entire world of IT and computing and are an important means for an organization to save a lot of money and regularly plan its computing expenses. This savings is made without owning physical hardware, but only for a license to virtually use another organization’s server. Among the leading organizations that allocate cloud services can be found the technology giants Amazon and Microsoft as well as a variety of other companies.

What is the uniqueness of cloud services for businesses?

The uniqueness of cloud services for businesses lies in the fact that these services make it possible to stop purchasing hardware and technology at high costs and to transfer the investment to services that involve carrying at significantly lower costs.

For example, in order to set up an email server, organizations were previously required to purchase a server to store and process that activity. The purchase of the server (an operation whose cost is not eliminated at all) was accompanied by the allocation of space from the office to the location of the server as well as cooling and maintenance expenses that require high expenses from the server owners. In addition, since the organization owned the server, it was the one that bore everything and the costs would fall directly on it.

These expenses are currently saved since the servers are located in a remote location and are not owned by the purchaser of the service. Thus, a malfunction in the servers is the responsibility of the service provider and finding the alternative in the event of a malfunction goes to the provider, while the allocation of office real estate and electricity no longer falls to the organization, but it pays for it at the price of renting the cloud servers.

In fact, the price of cloud services is charged depending on the required storage volume, the desired amount of services, the required computing power and other characteristics according to the customer’s requirements, which indicates the great flexibility that can be achieved through these services.

Because the cloud services sit on a company’s physical infrastructure designed to meet the changing needs of various entities, the cloud services enable the achievement of great flexibility: do you want to increase the storage space? There is no problem, the service provider will simply allocate you more space on the server system. The same principle is also valid in relation to the establishment of new services such as e-mail servers or backups.

What does this service include?

The cloud services are intended to actually replace all the services that could be obtained in the past from the existence of a physical hardware infrastructure in the client’s offices. Among the common services:

Creating virtual workstations: instead of purchasing an expensive computer for each employee, businesses can set up “virtual machines” on the cloud services, that is, the workstation that ran on an external server but from the employee’s point of view, it is a normal computer for everything.
Establishment of internal e-mail services – these services allow the organization to establish an internal e-mail infrastructure (host exchange) which is based and runs entirely on a server that is not located in the client’s offices. These services make it possible to obtain:
Using dedicated mailboxes for the office at a low cost but with a large storage capacity.
Sharing meeting diaries of employees in the organization.
Access via mobile and remotely controlled systems.
Lack of dependence on office servers.
Backing up the corporate information: Organizations that use computer systems are always afraid that the information will be lost as a result of a computer problem and therefore often resort to backing up the information on another external server. Today, the activity in the cloud enables the backup on the external computers of the Agon so that the establishment of dedicated backup servers is saved.

Cloud servers benefit from advanced technology which guarantees, among other things: optimal security, the possibility of restoring information immediately, means of compressing information so that the storage volume and bandwidth are not damaged, backup for a multitude of workstations such as telephones, laptops and stationary computers, data systems and e-mail servers.

Another significant service is the information security services. In the past, when organizations physically stored their servers in the companies’ offices, the entire security issue was the responsibility of the organization and it was exposed to significant cyber vulnerabilities when its ability to deal with them was less.

The situation is different in cloud services since the organizations that store the servers are very strong organizations that maintain the highest possible level of information security. Thus, organizations can entrust their sensitive information in the safe hands of the cloud service providers.

What are the types of cloud services?

Cloud services can be divided into several types which are determined by the location of the servers. The first type is a local cloud (or private cloud) this system works on a cloud located in the client’s local server system. This cloud system does not enjoy the advantages of the lack of ownership of the computing and the allocation of the storage areas.

The second type of system is a public cloud system. This system sits on the servers of other companies (as we will elaborate on later) and provides the most advantages that the cloud systems are able to provide.

The third type is a hybrid solution, i.e. one that combines a local system and an external system in order to achieve results that combine the advantages of both systems both in terms of accessibility to information, maintaining information security, thus achieving many benefits for the business.

As mentioned, cloud services are currently provided by the largest technology corporations in the world.

The most common service in Israel today is Amazon’s AWS. This service is one of the main growth engines of the giant corporation and therefore a lot of capital is invested in it. Amazon’s collaboration with VMware allows them to achieve optimal performance in setting up virtual workstations.

After Amazon stands Microsoft, which offers a comprehensive package of services through the Office 365 services that provide access and backup to all the services that Microsoft provides.

Google also currently offers a variety of cloud services for businesses in a product known as G-Suite. Google offers usage of free applications that compete with well-known office programs such as Word or Excel and thus offers a complementary service to that offered by Microsoft.

In the future we are even expected to see the penetration of the cloud services of the Chinese giant Alibaba into Israel. Apart from the foreign giants, other companies such as Bezeq, Bezeq International or Cisco offer cloud services in Israel.

When you go to choose a service, check whether all the options provided on the central servers are indeed relevant for you or whether you can manage without these systems.

What are the advantages of a cloud service for businesses?

The prominent advantage of the cloud services is the savings in establishing a physical computing infrastructure in the organization’s offices. But to this advantage are added many aspects that improve the work in the organization:

Creating an option for uniform communication of all workstations through the corporate network. Each device is able to communicate with the cloud computing and perform operations on the internal network remotely.
Cloud services help and reduce costs of responding to various regulatory needs in the field of customer service or privacy protection in databases.
Cloud systems improve the cyber security level of the organization due to the high security standard of the infrastructure providers.
Who are cloud solutions suitable for?

Cloud solutions are suitable for businesses that manage internal communication networks and electronic communication with clients who are not interested in having physical hardware in their offices. The services allow access to advanced computing power and at lower costs than purchasing and maintaining the services provided in-house.

How do you choose cloud computing services for businesses?

First, you must determine what your organization’s computing needs are in the coming years so that you can set a spending ceiling but not limit yourself in terms of information systems. Second, consider which services you wish to outsource to the cloud: e-mail, storage and backups, customer support services or other services. Examining the feasibility of outsourcing the services to the cloud will allow you to map the computing needs of the business and arrive at an efficient allocation of its resources. Third, we looked at the effort required to deliver these services. This is not a purely physical effort, of course, but a considerable financial investment and large computing expenses. Therefore, it is advisable to refer to these actions after deep thought. Finally, examine the level of support you will receive from the provider and whether it is sufficient, or is excessive and not really required for you.

After you have examined and mapped all of these options, you will get a good picture of your business needs and you will be able to approach in a coherent way the choice of cloud services that will suit you both in terms of price, but no less important, in terms of matching the scope of services to the needs of the business.