Since the pandemic lockdown, people have been working from home. The workforce has been slow in returning to the corporate office setting. An IFS survey conducted last year reports that almost three-quarters of respondents plan to increase spending on digital transformation. The climate control benefits include a reduction of CO2 emissions due to less commuting and travel to in-person meetings. Technologies like Microsoft Teams have made multi-site team meetings easy and readily available.

Cloud migration is the price of admission to competing in the digital world. 

Moving your IT environment to the cloud reduces the need for additional hardware, but more importantly, to your bottom line and the environment, cloud migration modernizes your operations. While being on the cloud, and using robust cloud-enabled services like IronOrbit’s INFINITY Workspaces, won’t make your business carbon neutral, it is a significant first step on that journey.

DEMATERIALIZATION

How You Can Reduce the Environmental Impact on Doing Business

Hardware casings, cords, adaptors, and other electrical products are called E-waste. E-waste is a growing problem. Significant environmental damage happens because nature cannot absorb these products. E-Waste is a significant contributor to the haphazard disposal of old electronics: they’re inert. All E-Waste products contain hazardous materials of one kind or another. The toxic materials are predominantly lead and mercury.

By switching to IronOrbit’s cloud, you can reduce the amount of hardware because you no longer need to invest in so many on-site computer stations. There’s no need to pay for its maintenance or replace machinery when it becomes obsolete. Instead, you only pay for the exact services you need. Over time, this saves you money. Cloud computing can help your company become sustainable while making it more profitable and productive.

Reducing Needless Travel Reduces Carbon Emissions

INFINITY Workspaces is our brand of DaaS, robust technology that enables employees to work remotely with ease. There are different INFINITY packages to fit specific use cases. Even designers and engineers can access the most demanding modern applications on their mobile devices. INFINITY Workspaces empowers Geographically dispersed teams to do their best work. The technology inspires productivity while eliminating the need for lengthy commutes. It also eliminates the carbon emissions associated with daily commutes.

Adopting a work-from-home environment or even a hybrid workplace is an excellent way to reduce your business’s carbon footprint. You could also save some money in the process.

Shared Data Centers Reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHGs)

On-premises servers and data centers use substantial amounts of energy both for running and cooling. The manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of the hardware and peripheral products also add to GHG emissions. Companies can reduce emissions considerably by moving to a cloud computing environment. Once a company moves to the cloud, they use shared data centers. Like the ones operated by IronOrbit, shared data centers run far more efficiently than individual facilities or on-premises servers. There is no longer a need for personal equipment.

A recent forecast by the International Data Corporation (IDC) reports that cloud computing will prevent the emission of more than one billion metric tons of CO2 between 2021 and 2024. Moving away from legacy software and hardware and towards cloud adoption is a logical next step for companies. Insofar as business continuity and investment in the future, cloud migration is a necessity.

Cloud computing and all the digital benefits of having your IT infrastructure on the cloud are valuable for IT departments. IT departments can work more closely with business leaders to develop new sustainability goals. It is favorable for companies, and of course, it contributes to a healthier environment.

Contact us for a no-obligation proof of concept. We’re here to help.

The post How Digital Technology Helps Deal with Climate Change first appeared on IronOrbit.

What Are the Most Common Benefits Forward-leaning Businesses Are Trying to Achieve in a Cloud Environment?

Scalability

Companies like yours operate within finite budgetary constraints. As a result, it’s important to have predictable expenditures as the organization grows. The cloud allows for your CIO to forecast precisely what the IT expenditures will be as your business makes forward progress. Alternatively, those organizations that have busy and slower seasons are able to scale up and down with fluctuations in the marketplace and demand for their service/product.

Cost-savings

When looking at the ROI of implementing a cloud-based IT environment to house your data and workflow, the entire lifecycle of your IT assets must come into play. For example, in-house IT assets require purchase, maintenance, management, and replacement. Cloud assets have no upfront purchase cost and are continuously managed, maintained, and updated. The other factor that comes into play is the expected increase in efficiency and productivity from cloud assets. When one compares apples to apples, cloud infrastructure comes out the winner in terms of cost-effectiveness.

Unified IT Environment

Right now, most organizations considering the move to the cloud are using both cloud-based applications and in-house infrastructure. This can lead to speedbumps in internal processes that slow down the workflow to full-on roadblocks that keep you from pursuing your next pro-growth action plan. By moving everything into a cloud environment, the integration of applications and the automation of manual processes are simplified.

Digital Transformation

As we mentioned earlier, mature companies that are trying to match wits with their younger, venture-backed competition realize that they too must view technology as a business enabler. Digital transformation is not something that can be tacked onto a business, but rather, it is how a business views its processes today and its potential tomorrow based on what current and emerging technologies can do. Because of the unlimited power and capacity of the cloud, it is the perfect place to explore and implement digital transformation strategies.

Flexibility

In 1965, Gordon Moore – then CEO and Co-founder of Intel – made the observation that because the number of transistors in a microprocessors seem to double each year, the computing power available doubles each year as well. Moore’s Law (as his observation has been dubbed) has proven true in the rapid pace of technology growth since that day. The cloud allows you the flexibility needed to take advantage of rapid technology changes and expansion almost in real-time. (More on Moore’s Law in our next article, “Hidden Cloud Benefits – What the Marketing Departments of Cloud Technology Companies Forget to Tell You.” (link this to article #2)

Speed of Deployment for New Services/Products

Beating your competitor to market may mean the difference between gaining the majority of market share or eating the crumbs left by the guy who got to market first. In 1802, Humphrey Davy came up with the first electric light, the Electric Arc Lamp, almost 77 years before Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879. Between Davy and Edison were at least four other recorded inventors that had their version of an electric light source. So why did we all use Edison’s light bulbs until the recent adoption of halogen and LED bulbs? Because Edison was the first to bring a commercially viable bulb to market.

That’s what the cloud does for you.

Need a satellite office set up in Seattle tomorrow? – It can be done. The information connectivity part of it happens in a matter of minutes. Need the infrastructure to support a product roll out by next Thursday? – not a problem. It’s a few keystrokes.

Business Continuity

It’s not a stretch at all to say that if you don’t have geo-redundant cloud backups and cloud-based workflow assets, you don’t really have business continuity. Unfortunately, many companies are reliant upon an in-house server to save the day when things go bad. But storms like Katrina, pandemics like COVID19, and ransomware attacks like WannaCry demonstrate that an in-house server just isn’t up to the task of protecting confidential client information, proprietary data, and critical workflow.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Closely related to and a key component of a robust Business continuity strategy is Backup and Disaster Recovery. Protecting your data from theft, fire, flood, storms, power outages, and human error is essential, and the cloud is the secure, efficient way to meet that goal. Automatic, verifiable, monitored backups of data into a cloud environment help you meet industry standard and compliance requirements.

If you’ve been considering the cloud for a while now and reading blogs and marketing materials from cloud hosting companies, you’ve likely seen these cloud advantages repeatedly. What is needed is a team of cloud specialists to help you put all the pieces together so your company can begin to benefit from working in a cloud environment. Don’t get left behind, IronOrbit is here to help.

Questions? Want to Learn More?
Give Us a Call at (714) 777-3222

The post The Benefits of the IronOrbit Cloud first appeared on IronOrbit.

Businesses shouldn’t gamble by settling with less-than-adequate disaster recovery. Their IT infrastructure absolutely needs to be able to withstand the most sophisticated cyber-attack or the most destructive natural disaster. Budgets are too tight and the competition is too high in this economy for any kind of setback. Fortunately, businesses with on-site infrastructures have an alternative to expensive, self-run, off-site backup facilities: fully-managed private cloud solutions from IronOrbit.

Many businesses in the northeastern United States with on-site IT infrastructures recently found themselves under-protected with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. These companies lost all their files and applications as floods destroyed their computing equipment—part of the toll of $50 billion in total economic losses related to the storm. On the other hand, some businesses may have been able to protect their IT hardware from water damage but were one of 8.5 million customers without power. Many companies lost productivity, sales, and customers as a result. The Manhattan-based websites Gawker, Buzzfeed, and the Huffington Post all went down after power outages at their self-hosted data centers, for example. They each lost about $100,000-$150,000 in ad revenues per day during the downtime (based on their yearly revenues of around $60 million).

Businesses caught off-guard by Hurricane Sandy shouldn’t dismiss the disaster as a “once-in-a-lifetime-storm” that will never be repeated and thus does not justify future preventative adjustments to their IT infrastructure. Firstly, “once-in-a-lifetime” natural disasters, in spite of their name, seem to be occurring every six-to-twelve months. Consider that the Japanese tsunami ($300 billion in total economic losses), the Thailand floods ($45 billion, while also causing a 28% increase in the price of hard drives), and the 2011 U.S. tornado outbreak ($20+ billion) have all happened within the last two years. Secondly, businesses with on-site IT infrastructures can attain better protection from data loss and downtime without having to pay for expensive off-site backup facilities and hardware by switching to the cloud. With the cloud, companies get a more reliable, mobile, and secure infrastructure for a lower cost and with superior disaster recovery.

Cloud computing can be trusted to prevent data loss and downtime better than on-premise IT infrastructures for several reasons. First, the cloud’s off-site servers will usually not be affected by the same localized storms that its users deal with. Second, even if a cloud data center were damaged by a hurricane, clouds have data backup sites and ready-to-go infrastructures or “hot sites” throughout the country. Finally, the cloud does not require any on-site hardware and can be accessed from anywhere. If the main office of a business has been destroyed, employees can access their files and applications from a cloud-based infrastructure while reconvening at a temporary location or working from home.

IronOrbit users in the Northeast experienced first-hand the ability of the cloud to prevent data loss and downtime. During Sandy, it was business as usual for all the IronOrbit users with Internet access (including via mobile data networks). Guillo Cianci of the Long Island-based Fratello Construction Inc. remarked, “Hurricane Sandy could have been a catastrophic data disaster for our company but our business didn’t skip a beat. Some of our neighbors were not so lucky. Hosting our IT with IronOrbit has been one of the best business decisions we have made; knowing that my business will always be up and running pays off every day.”

On top of the inherent disaster recovery capabilities of the cloud, IronOrbit takes additional measures to prevent even the possibility of data loss and downtime. With 24x7x365 technical support, we can help you with any issue at any time—even in the midst a power outage or destructive storm during the middle of the night. We’ve set industry-low Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) of 4 hours and 12 hours respectively. At the moment, we’re also offering to rebuild the IT infrastructure of any company that has been affected by Hurricane Sandy for free. Signing up with IronOrbit means no more worrying about disasters, downtime, or data loss—with us, you’ll be protected from all three.

The post IronOrbit After Sandy: The Data That Survived The Storm first appeared on IronOrbit.