Introduction
In the last decade, cloud services have transformed nearly every sector in the IT industry. The rise of cloud service providers like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure has heralded a new generation in service computing allowing users and providers to build highly scalable and efficient applications. Ranging from small websites that run on minimal server resources to large-scale computing tasks that run powerful servers and applications to serve billions of users across continents have become quite common in the industry.
IT companies are quickly adapting to the landscape either by replacing their existing on-premise infrastructure or slowly phasing out outdated technology by adopting cloud platforms. Field service management has also migrated from existing on-premise systems to cloud-based applications served by the major giants. Some of the major benefits of cloud computing in the field service industry are as follows:
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Benefits Of Cloud Computing In Field Service Industry
Ease Of Scalability
Scalability problems were the primary reasons organizations had to focus on on-premise servers to build large-scale applications. Field service applications have also had to build powerful on-premise infrastructures. However, with the ease in scalability of cloud computing introduced by Amazon in its AWS platform change, the way organizations managed their data and their applications. Now user can switch to more powerful servers and scale to serve millions of users with a click of a button. This not only reduces the manpower necessary to install and operate the servers, it also significantly reduces human errors that often cause problems relating to data loss or configuration mishaps. The decreased costs in managing servers allow managers to focus on more important tasks and divert organization spending’s towards better objectives.
Increased Efficiency
Cloud servers are built to increase efficiency. Starting from the tiniest servers with minimal computing power to high powered clusters that help run powerful rendering applications are possible with much-increased efficiency that was very hard to achieve in on-premise solutions. Thus, companies in the field service industry have also slowly phased out their existing infrastructures and moved to cloud-based servers that help them run with increased efficiency without any downtime that plagues on-premise solutions. With the help of continuous integration and continuous delivery, organizations are now able to deploy their applications and updates with a single line of code. The build process is significantly refined while codebases run on separate servers that help development teams to test and deploy only when all bugs are fixed. Any bugs and improvements to the code are pushed to central repositories that run tests and deliver detailed stats on the code base. This helps field service management professionals to quickly adapt to changes based on their consumer demands.
Decreased Costs
Reduction in costs of the cloud-based servers along with scalability were the primary reasons for the widespread adoption of cloud services. However, in the years since the cloud services have launched, there has been significant competition among the major players thereby reducing the costs even more to suit consumer demands. The quick adoption among users has also pushed the organizations to deploy more resource-oriented servers to the general public. Now large-scale data sets can be easily managed and analyzed through established machine learning algorithms that would have otherwise taken up days or months to process in on-premise servers. This reduction costs for computation have significantly helped field service management applications that serve multiple users across geographies.
Simplicity in Monitoring
Monitoring the server and their uptime along with performance have been a headache for IT professionals running on-premise servers. With the rise in cloud-based applications, numerous companies developed efficient monitoring solutions for users to track and report each and every statistic necessary to build and run large scale servers on the cloud. These major applications are now available on the marketplaces of the respective cloud service providers. Moreover, the ease of implementing and tracking uptime and statistics by integrating applications that run on similar platforms have made it significantly easier for users to deploy them on their own field service management applications.
Mobility Services
The increase in the number of mobile users led to a significant change in the development ecosystem. Eventually, all major organizations had to serve their application through Android, iOS and Windows mobile operating systems. Thus, the development in each of their platforms became canter focus to allow better services for organizations. The cloud service providers went a step ahead and built all the necessary tools that any organization might require into neatly packaged services that developers can easily use to create mobile apps and serve at minimal costs. Field service management applications have also deployed these servers and features to increase mobile engagement among their users while reducing costs and implementation period.
Conclusion
Cloud services like AWS, GCloud and Azure have become the de-facto standard for building any kind of application for any type of device or user. Due to the major benefits outlined above, the field service industry has also moved to the cloud and the other with on-premise infrastructures are also slowly phasing out their respecting systems by replacing them with the cloud. The IaaS, SaaS and PaaS models have not only proven to be the next generation of computing but are also helping organizations serve their consumers through less downtime and increased efficiency.