Is the Adobe Creative Cloud Worth It?

Posted on September 3, 2014 Updated on September 3, 2014

Those of us who were used to buying software licenses off the shelf were a little thrown off by Adobe’s announcement on May 6, 2013 that the company would no longer release new versions of Creative Suite, at least not in the manner we had grown accustomed to.

No longer could users of Photoshop, Premier or Illustrator purchase software updates, install a DVD and run an executable to load the latest updates. Adobe was taking its suite into the cloud, where the company could more easily make updates across platforms and ostensibly save millions of dollars not only on support but product packaging.

But it was Amazon.com in 2006 that truly popularized the term “the cloud” when it released its Elastic Compute Cloud to allow scalable deployment of applications via a Web service.

  Benefits of Cloud Technology

• Easier to access software from any computer, device or location.
• Multiple users can access data, potentially increasing productivity.
• Enables resource sharing and reduces overall, long-term costs.
• Centralized data is more secure and easier to maintain.
• Performance can be monitored as cloud computing allows for more reliable minimization of device failure, software imperfections or human error to create a better, more seamless user experience.

The fear of losing sensitive data is greatly diminished due to cloud technology. Saving important information on an external hard drive for example can easily be lost the instant you, say; knock it off the coffee table. I’ve had more than my share of accidents where, “oops,” I dropped my external hard drive. This equipment is highly fragile, even the LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive with its thick, durable orange plastic protector. Still, it’s a machine that is not immune to human or manufacturing errors.

Nonetheless, many users are not as comfortable using cloud technology, at least so they think. That can be explained like with any initial refusal to accept new technology: we’ve grown a bit too comfortable with “the old way,” in this case utilizing manual software. But, look at just what happened today. Facebook went down. Although Facebook uses cloud technology there was still an outage today and of course the outage might not have anything to do with cloud technology. The big social media mogul lost approximately $22,453 a minute while the site was down. Facebook was down for about 15 minutes in the UK, Germany and U.S. According to the most recent TechCrunch article Facebook potentially lost more money, just for being down due to key advertisers and the time in which the outage took place.

According to Cloud Times:

“Social networking plays a major part in the everyday lives of many people. Facebook is one social networking site that has more than 400 million active users. The possibility of social media and cloud integration is compelling. Social networks are being more than an online gathering of friends.”

Cloud technology offers users the ability to store imperative data without the fear of your hard drive crashing and losing your life’s work potentially. Many companies are moving in towards cloud technology, with one survey claiming earlier this year that the cloud can trim IT budgets by 15 percent.

Personally, I was skeptical of purchasing Adobe CC. But, being that I am self-employed and working in multimedia the upgrade makes perfect sense. Adobe CC is ideal not only for web designers, but graphic artists, photographers, videographers/video editors, and nearly any creative business or professional. While I am not too fond of having to pay a monthly (or annual) fee for Adobe Creative Cloud, I am excited about the additional 20 GB of cloud storage and 28 applications at my fingertips, including Muse that allows nearly anyone to easily create an amazing website without the need to know code via the clumsiness of Dreamweaver.

But with so many new software apps to learn, the experience can be daunting. I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of skills one needs to develop in order to master all the tools in Adobe CC. I’ve been working with Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Bridge, and Media Encoder for years and have also dabbled with Dreamweaver, Illustrator and InDesign. I attempted to learn Fireworks and Flash, only to fall short of patience. Now, all of these software apps are at the same time more intricate, intuitive and technical. Even better all upgrades magically appear when released.

In addition to Muse, new offerings include: Prelude, InCopy, Gaming SDK 1.3, Edge Animate, Edge Code, Edge Reflow, Exchange Panel, Extendedscript Toolkit CC, SpeedGrade, Lightroom. Some of these apps were available in previous versions of Adobe. I had the Adobe Creative Master Suite 5.0 and never upgraded to 5.5 or 6.0. After all, with a student discount (was attending school at the time) it was still a good several hundred dollars to purchase. Having to upgrade to 5.5 would have cost me even more now without the student discount.

You can pay monthly or annual software fees to remain current with Adobe CC, and once you bite the bullet you can’t go back. But before we had to pay for upgrades anyway. Today, if you don’t upgrade you get stuck in a time warp. Anyone out there still using Pagemaker?

So, I was beyond grateful that Adobe honored previous users that were running CS3 or higher. For the first year, I am paying $29.99 per month, or $359.88 total. I am a bit skeptical of the latest Premiere Pro version, as I had grown accustomed to CS5 Premiere Pro. But, when the world evolves we must also adapt, learn and grow with current changes or trends, especially if we expect to make a living in the tech world.

The Bottom Line:

Adobe CC is designed for any and all media professionals, small or large businesses alike. If you haven’t upgraded you probably should. The suite costs $29.99 a month for individuals (the price is a little more for the business package) and increases to $49.99 a month the following year, but the increased productivity, ease of backups and increased security makes it worth it, especially when as a business owner you can write off the expense.

Think about how often we upgrade our smartphones, computers, etc. Technology is evolving and at such a rapid rate that we must continuously stay on our toes and remain agile enough to embrace new way of thinking and working that increase efficiency and maximize output as well as income. Learn why more and more organizations are embracing the cloud.