Benefits of the Cloud

There have been many advances in the IT industry over recent years and none more prevalent than the ever increasing adoption of the cloud. This presents many significant opportunities for the modern treasurer from increased efficiency, greater data accuracy and security all delivered in a more time efficient manner, leading to better informed decision making and reduced overheads.
In short cloud computing liberates organisations from devoting precious time, people and budget to activities that don’t directly contribute to the bottom line while still obtaining IT infrastructure capabilities to its fullest.
when a company needs more bandwidth than usual, a cloud-based service can instantly meet the demand because of the vast capacity of the service’s remote servers. In fact, this flexibility is so crucial that 65% of respondents to an InformationWeek survey said “the ability to quickly meet business demands” was an important reason to move to cloud computing.
When companies start relying on cloud-based services, they no longer need complex disaster recovery plans. Cloud computing providers take care of most issues, and they do it faster using the latest. A recent survey found that businesses using the cloud were able to resolve issues in an average of 2.1 hours, nearly four times faster than businesses that didn’t use the cloud (8 hours). The same study found that mid-sized businesses had the best recovery times of all, taking almost half the time of larger companies to recover.
In 2014, companies spent 18 working days per month managing on-site software updates and security. But cloud computing suppliers do the server maintenance, software maintenance and upgrades including security updates themselves using specialist and industry leading practices, freeing up time and resources to focus on core business functions and other tasks.
Cloud computing services are typically pay as you go, so there’s no need for capital expenditure at all. And because cloud computing is much faster to deploy, businesses have minimal project start-up costs and predictable ongoing operating expenses.
Cloud computing increases collaboration by allowing all employees to synchronise to a single information source. It allows staff to work on documents and shared applications simultaneously or elect to follow colleagues and data sources to receive critical updates, automatically as they happen. A survey by Frost & Sullivan found that companies which invested in collaboration technology had a 400% return on investment.
Finpacific's infrastructure partner, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has world-class, highly secure data centres at major centres of the world including one in Sydney, that utilise state-of-the art electronic surveillance and multi-factor access control systems. Data centres are staffed 24x7 by trained security guards, and access is authorized strictly on a least privileged basis.
Multiple geographic regions and Availability Zones including nomination to a particular zone (example , Australia) allowing for confidence in the event of most failure modes, including natural disasters or system failures.
Optional automatic encryption using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service allowing another layer of network security to instances by creating private subnets and adding an IPsec VPN tunnel.
AWS has achieved ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifications and has been validated as a Level 1 service provider under the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS). Their infrastructure undergo annual SOC 1,2 and 3 audits and have been successfully evaluated at the Moderate level for Federal government systems as well as DIACAP Level 2 for DoD systems.