This is the second in a series of four posts exploring how cloud server hosting offers significant advantages to companies who want to scale their business.

In this post: Scalable computing grows with businesses.

One of the main advantages of cloud server hosting is its scalability. This is just another way of saying that it’s easy to add or remove computing capacity, bandwidth, storage and user accounts. Since you don’t need to have any hardware or software installed locally, it’s extremely easy to add more capacity when you need it, or decommission capacity when it’s sitting idle.  The model is very flexible!

Flexibility and ease of use are important advantages and ones that are often undervalued. If you’re trying to grow your business, your computing needs will frequently change. Imagine, for instance:

• you have an interview on a drive-time radio show, and suddenly you’re expecting a lot more website hits
• you produce a new demonstration video and want to host it
• you want to add an inventory-management tool to organize your supply chain

All of these scenarios will place additional demands on your bandwidth or processing capacity. Using cloud server hosting, you can set up a new virtual or Cloud Server in as little as 30 seconds to handle these needs.  And if you find you have excess capacity you’re not using, you can take those servers offline just as quickly. You’ll never be caught with too little capacity, and you’ll never need to watch a valuable piece of hardware depreciate as it sits unused. The flexibility we discussed also leads to several opportunities for cash savings, which we’ll explore in a future post.

From the usability side, scalability means easier management of your people and easier organization of your growth. If you bring in new personnel to support a major product launch or a temporary team to do an internal audit in preparation for an IPO, you can set them all up with user accounts, network access, e-mail and scheduling – and manage security clearances and automatic expiration – all through a centralized interface, and all without installing any new hardware or software on-site. Cloud computing scalability means that you can have the capacity you need as quickly as you decide you need it. Certain resources can even be set up to scale automatically in response to demand (e.g. processing capacity for running large data sets). With flexible modern cloud servers, computing scalability has become easily available to the business world, and smart companies around the globe are learning how to use it to facilitate growth.

Check back for parts three and four of this series, where we’ll look at:

• Financial outlay for hardware, software and personnel
• Easy access to managed services like backup, email and security

Atlantic.Net also offers HIPAA compliant hosting solutions; learn more about our HIPAA Data Centers.