Cloud hosting is just one of the latest and greatest in a slew of services tied to the Internet. Cloud hosting is characterized by services spread across many servers in a remote data center and accessed via the Internet. Because these services are dispersed, this lessens the chance of downtime and increases the level of security at all levels of your business.

If your agency still hosts any of your services on site, you remain vulnerable to service disruptions that include natural disasters, fire, theft, or even cyber breach. That’s why insurance agencies of all sizes have begun adopting cloud hosting across many of their most critical business infrastructures.

Did we mention cloud hosting is typically less expensive than buying and maintaining on-premise hardware? For that reason alone, it’s worth looking at how this service could impact your business.

Examples of Cloud Hosting in Insurance

Today, you have three main choices when it comes to cloud hosting. The first is the traditional on-site installation of dedicated servers and virtual private networks. These configurations are more costly to maintain because they are tied to hardware purchases that will put a drain on your bottom line. These infrastructures must be maintained, which necessitates a full-time or part-time technology resource. On-site hosting can include your email, or website, or other services relevant to your business.

Cloud hosting takes these internal frameworks and hosts them remotely in a dedicated server room. These huge facilities are maintained 24/7/365 by teams dedicated to their security and upkeep. Unlike the limited storage on an on-site server, cloud hosting can scale up as your business needs it without the user ever experiencing any of the on-site slow-downs when traffic is high.

The third choice is a hybrid model that makes use of on-site hardware and cloud-based software.

Get a free assessment of which model is right for your business.

Cloud hosting is currently impacting small insurance agencies in the following ways:

• Infrastructure
  Entire infrastructures can now be housed in the cloud. Virtual machines can be built in the cloud with more processing power than your on-site laptop could ever hold. Large data files can also be housed in the cloud to free up office server bandwidth. The cloud can expand and contract with our needs, making it a low-cost, yet an unlimited resource for your business.
• Application
  Hosted software-as-a-service is likely something your office has been using for years. From Dropbox to google docs, your customer relationship management (CRM) software, and more, these are tools that you access through the Internet and utilize when you need it in your business. Many desktop productivity tools, including accounting, email, and web conferencing are all examples of beneficial cloud hosting services.
• Business
  Today, cloud hosting heavily impacts business processes. This can include everything from claims processing to procurement and expense management. In traditional models, these processes were driven by an on-site server that often failed to be regularly upgraded with the latest security patches or software upgrades. Today, updates happen constantly in the cloud, and cloud hosting is built upon a common framework that allows your office processes to integrate more seamlessly than ever before.

How could cloud hosting impact your agency?

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