cloud based application

Enterprises of all sizes have been reaping the benefits of cloud services for some time now. However, small and medium enterprises in tier-2 and tier-3 cities still are apprehensive of leveraging these services.

Cloud Services are ubiquitous now. It is not just an infrastructure anymore, nor does it host applications that are relevant only to large enterprises. An entire ecosystem has emerged on top of this platform. Applications with all sorts of capabilities have mushroomed, serving users at individual as well as enterprises of all sizes.

The Services offered by cloud has potential to transform enterprises, giving them a big leap in new world ruled by technology. In smaller cities and for small enterprises, these services are actually a boon as they make world class products available at affordable process in pay-as-you-go scheme. Here are some of the reasons enterprises in tier-2 and tier-3 cities should use cloud:

Serving you from your region: Cloud infrastructure is available readily in India now

Cost Effective: To build a modest infrastructure for an enterprise, large capital is needed to procure and deploy hardware. In addition, there are recurring costs to rent hosting providers, maintenance fee, etc. Cloud providers have processes set to procure and deploy hardware at scale and maintain the infrastructure. The infrastructure itself is shared by multiple clients and cost distributed to clients only based on their usage. Naturally, small and medium enterprises have a very minute footprint in this infrastructure and their corresponding cost of usage is also way less than what is needed for dedicated setup.

High Quality: Cloud Infrastructure Providers buy millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. There are only few vendors in the world who can fulfill such massive orders. Obviously, these are among the best hardware vendors in the world.

Similarly, to take care of this infrastructure, they hire world’s some of the most talented software and system engineers. Be assured of service quality – it is guaranteed going to be much better service than what your local small vendor can provide.

Fulfill Regulatory Requirements: with the advent of e-governance, government is bringing in regulations to require vendors to store data within the national boundaries. Cloud datacentres are now easily available within the country and you can cherry-pick where your resources are going to be provisioned, making it easy to adhere to Government Policies. This is very important, if you work in government sector.

Availability: Your data is available anywhere and anytime. Outages because of power unavailability is a thing of past.

Scalability: Cloud computing allows you to easily scale your infrastructure the way you want it – scale up, scale out, or you let cloud scale the infrastructure for your application based on usage. Remove barriers and let the business fly!

Disaster Recovery: Your apps and data are usually stored on multiple machines in multiple datacentres that are in different geographical region. Such geo-redundant infrastructure is a must for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.

New Business Opportunities: Advanced features like archiving, Data Protection, ease of business for customers definitely give a competitive advantage. In fact, it may as well open new business opportunities or help manoeuvre your business into newer territories.

Teamwork: Easy access will always keep your team connected without delay in any work, which results in more connected and increased teamwork.

Like any other technologies, cloud computing too has its drawbacks. The biggest being change in processes and way of thinking, especially for business heads. However, when compared with potential gains, these are very minor and short-lived. Moving to cloud is inevitable for you and your business. You may be surprised to find how you are already using cloud services unknowingly. Adopt it wholeheartedly for a better future for your enterprise.

Student Information Systems have come a long way in helping traditional educational institutions get better in handling processes by simplifying them with technology.

Student admission and enrollment process is one of the trickiest of process for an educational institution. The larger the institution, the bigger the problem. The complexity also increases because of popularity, student/school proportion in an area, and such reasons. some of the factors that complicate this process are:

Time sensitive nature – As it requires lot of time to handle the applications received from the manual admission process and generate the results within the time constraints.
Need for co-ordination – Involves a lot of coordination between the individuals as well as teams to keep the proper process of the manual admission.
Keeping it cost effective – admission process is traditionally very laborious process as it requires resources to maintain and handle the large amount of admission applications. It is a challenge to keep manual process also cost-effective.
Error Prone – The process, being manual, is inherently error prone. Mistakes at this stage cause significant impact to the long term of schools’ success, especially if a deserving student is missed for some reason. Needless to say, students’ also miss the chance to be among the elite that institution offers.
Extremely Slow – Being manual process, the various layers of checks and data feeding involved, the process needs several resources deployed to be efficient. Unfortunately, this means more time in coordination and higher costs.
Tiring – Admissions usually happen in summers. Often students and parents have to stand in long queues in summer heat. Staff members also have to be on the field to manage queues and help prospective students and their care givers.
Eco-unfriendly – Lot of paper-work is required, resources to store and archive the papers which is not cost-effective as well as Eco-unfriendly.
Accountability – Manual admissions process does break inevitably as the institution grows and workload increases. It is also difficult to hold people responsible, thereby making it difficult to improve the system.
Vendors – Third party vendors might get involved in planning logistics. This adds to coordination which is usually not cheap.

To overcome the above problems and to cut down the cost, what educational institutes should prefer is to transform from the manual process to the automated system and adopt the technologies which can be cost effective as well as beneficial for the institutes. There are solutions available now that adopt latest technologies, processes and cloud based infrastructure to keep the process simple, light and gets the job done.