Every business has a few basic requirements that needs to be done, irrespective of its domain of work. From accounting related work like bookkeeping, invoicing, or email, VoIP, or project management, file sharing, data storage or time tracking any business needs these at some point of time. Modern days businesses have started using cloud based solutions to fulfill these requirements.

According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 18% in 2017 to total $246.8 billion, up from $209.2 billion in 2016.

“While some organizations are still figuring out where cloud actually fits in their overall IT strategy, an effort to cost optimize and bring forth the path to transformation holds strong promise and results for IT outsourcing (ITO) buyers,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “Organizations are pursuing strategies because of the multidimensional value of cloud services, including values such as agility, scalability, cost benefits, innovation and business growth. While all external-sourcing decisions will not result in a virtually automatic move to the cloud, buyers are looking to the ‘cloud first’ in their decisions, in support of time-to-value impact via speed of implementation.”

Here are some of the reasons why more organizations are shifting to cloud based solutions for their businesses:

1. Increased Productivity

Cloud based solutions eliminates the hassles involved in install and maintaining an on-site hardware solutions. It also eliminates software installation, software patching and other miscellaneous IT management tasks. Giving the staff the a chance to better use their time on more important business tasks.

2. Flexibility

Cloud based solutions are designed with self-service and on demand services. For example, a massive amount of computing resources – more storage, computing power, bandwidth – can be provisioned or given to your organization in just minutes, with just a few clicks of the mouse. In a similar manner, lesser computing resources may be given to your organization upon request.

These provisioning and deprovisioning of computer resources in cloud based solutions collectively gives the “flexibility” – a process in which a cloud system adapts to the workload of your organization by provisioning or deprovisioning computing resources.

3. Secure & Dependable

The best cloud computing services run on a worldwide network secure data centers, which use regularly upgraded, state-of-the-art computing hardware. This ensures continuous delivery of cloud based solutions.

Many cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, offer as part of their data storage packages geo-replication – referring to the replication of your organization’s data within the same data center or to a second data center. Geo-replication protects your organization’s data and applications in case of hardware failures or other calamitous failures in the primary datacenter.

4. Pricing options

Imagine the racks of servers to be bought, the IT team to manage the on-site datacenter and the 24/7 electricity for power and cooling the equipment. Hence it is not a cost effective option for small and medium-sized businesses to set up and manage one’s on-site datacenter. Cloud based solutions lessens the overall IT cost by removing the need to install an expensive hardware and software. Since cloud based solutions are flexible you are charged as per the plan you choose either per user or the parameter involved.

At GigeE, we help many businesses across Canada by providing them cloud based solutions for:

• Accounting
• Invoicing
• Payroll
• Time Tracking
• Bookkeeping
• VoIP/Telephony
• File Sharing
• Emails
• CRMs
• Data Storage
• Data Security
• Project Management

Call 888-366-4443 for more detailed information on our services.

The European Union (EU) law General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be enforced on May 25, 2018. GDPR being is an EU law, will be effective beyond EU’s physical borders as it is also applicable to organizations based outside the EU that either process personal data of staff or customers based in the EU or provide services to EU customers on behalf of another company.

“Any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person” – of EU residents has to be secured irrespective of the size of the firm. Even SMEs are expected to make appropriate adjustments on their end. A risk-based approach is required in this scenario, higher the risk, the more rigorous the Information Security measures.

In a white-paper “Guidelines for SMEs on the security of personal data processing” published by ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security), said “The GDPR provisions for a risk based approach is horizontal as there are not exemptions or light weight approaches based on the organization size, availability of resources and capabilities”.

Similar to large enterprises, SMEs, therefore, have to identify the level of risk of personal data of EU residents, taking into consideration the nature, scope, type, volume and context of data processing and pro-actively implement security measures corresponding to the level of risk presented.

^[1]Article 32 “Security of processing” of GDPR states:

1. “Taking into account the state of the art, the costs of implementation and the nature, scope, context and purposes of processing as well as the risk of varying likelihood and severity for the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller and the processor shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, including inter alia as appropriate: : (a) the pseudonymisation and encryption of personal data; (b) the ability to ensure the ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of systems and services processing personal data; (c) the ability to restore the availability and access to data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident; (d) a process for regularly testing, assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of technical and organisational measures for ensuring the security of the processing.”
2. “The controller and processor shall take steps to ensure that any natural person acting under the authority of the controller or the processor who has access to personal data does not process them except on instructions from the controller, unless he or she is required to do so by Union or Member State law.”^[1]

Any organization(s) found to be failing to GDPR compliance may get a fine worth €20M or 4% of annual global revenue, whichever is higher.

At GigE, we offer Information Security solutions that are compliant with local and international standards and regulations. If you just want to know if you are compliant with GDPR, we can perform audits for you. Call +1-888-366-4443 to get in touch with us to see how we can help you be prepared!

Resources:

[1] PrivazyPlan®: http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-32-security-of-processing-GDPR.htm