If you have taken a look at any B2B blog, website or magazine lately, it is more than likely that you would have read a bad review about cloud computing. Serious questions have been raised discussing the security of private data, the risk involved in trusting a computer to look after your documents, and even the worry that keeping everything online is not as aesthetically pleasing as having a nice, printed copy. This may resonate with some companies, but as a printing company, it certainly does not resonate with us!
Before the days of cloud computing, our company, Altaimage, a Design and Graphic Repro House based in Canary Wharf, would spend an exceptional amount of time and money sending proofs, delivering mock-ups and picking up annotated work. As I’m sure any company can imagine, this wasted a lot of time and money, primarily because many of our biggest clients are based in Central London; it wasn’t a short walk to drop a few pages off.
When cloud computing started entering businesses, I must admit, I had my doubts; could I trust a ‘cloud’ to hold the work of our company? Work that we had spent countless days (and very late nights!) working on. As a way to combat this, we started working closely with our clients to find out what they wanted from a cloud environment. Instead of following suit, we decided to develop our own software, known as ‘Ice: Interative Cloud Environment’; to wash any niggling doubts on security and stability out of our minds.
Since that moment, we haven’t looked back! Although cloud computing has received negative reviews, Ice has completely revolutionised the way that we conduct our day-to-day business. As a result of the cloud environment, jobs that once took days to complete can now be completed in mere hours.
Most companies that need to send attachments and annotations to clients each day will need a cloud environment to continue to work as a key player in their given industry. Technological advances are often deemed quite a scary process for companies that are set in their ways, but the advantages are endless. In this day and age, computers contain our thoughts, friends, memories and emotions on various social media sites. If we type our names into Google we can find various information on ourselves that we didn’t even know existed, and yet, so why are we concerned about saving information in a secure environment, that only authorised individuals can access? it all appears quite trivial when looking at it from a different point of view.
Ice has changed Altaimage and given us a fantastic opportunity to grow, what’s more, is that it has a knock on effect; as a result of our quick work, our clients can work smarter, and so forth. We can all read a negative review and brandish such an innovative new idea as ‘unstable’ but, if we give it a chance, we may be able to see a brighter future for our industries.
