Reaping the Economic Benefits of Cloud Computing
In these tough economic times, most businesses have tightened their belts and have stopped spending on anything closely resembling a luxury. Many are even delaying purchase of necessary items. No place is this more true than in corporate IT departments. Companies are adding a year or even two years to their normal equipment refresh cycles.
Unfortunately, businesses that have been delaying investments for the past few years may not realize an economic recovery soon enough to catch up with these delayed purchases. Many of these systems may now be approaching five or six years old. This is risky as platforms like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint have become completely essential to our businesses.
Of the many business benefits cloud computing can provide, perhaps the biggest is its economics.
- Businesses that are worried about paying high equipment "catch up" expenses can now skip these purchases - and realize that they will never need to make them again.
- Corporate Finance departments are attracted to the predictable operational expenses that cloud computing offers. No more surprises from equipment failures or unexpected expenses. Businesses pay only for what they need and use. Acquiring another business? Great, you know exactly what it will cost to provide base functionality. Spinning off a division? No problem, you'll know precisely how much you'll save when you stop paying for mailboxes you no longer need.
- Cloud computing offers the ability to catch up so your business is running on solid equipment and the latest software while reducing the need for upfront spending.
Of course, a full economic analysis needs to be performed to determine if these short term savings are worth it given the ongoing expenses, but frequently the savings are worth it. Cloud Strategies works with businesses to perform these specialized analyses. Let us help you understand the economic benefits cloud computing can provide your company and assist your finance team with achieving its business goals.
When Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Mail Platform to the Cloud?
Businesses of all sizes have a lot to consider with their IT Operations now that there are several viable options for providing utility computing services such as e-mail and collaboration through external hosting providers.
Most businesses still provide these services to their end users by maintaining expensive resources in-house. If you have a quality IT Organization and you have stayed current with investments in hardware and software, you may not be a strong candidate to move to the cloud today. If, on the other hand, you have struggled to maintain systems that can provide strategic value, and you know that you need to "do something", now is the perfect time to ask the question, "Should I be in the business of IT?"
Over the next few years, the timing of the decision to move to the cloud will largely be event based. It is only when a business is facing the need to make an investment in their systems that we believe that an analysis of the viability of moving to the cloud should be performed.
What events are most typical?
- E-mail platform upgrades - If you've been running on old hardware and old versions of Exchange because they were "good enough" or you didn't have the resources to maintain investments, you may be approaching a point where you "can't hang on any longer".
- E-mail platform migrations - Your organization may be running on e-mail platforms other than Microsoft Exchange, such as Lotus Notes, because of large legacy investments or the complexity of migration of e-mail and applications. If you are approaching a point where you are considering a move to Exchange, then this is also an opportunity to evaluate the many ways to get there.
- Major Business Events - There are too many to list, but suffice to say that any major change in business priorities, including mergers and acquisitions, downsizing or rapid growth, all provide stress on an IT department's infrastructure and people. If the IT department can't react fast enough to the needs of the business, perhaps this is a time to free them from the mundane burden of "keeping the lights on" and allow them to focus their efforts towards providing real business value working on more strategic information platforms and systems.
- Repeated System Failures - If you've suffered through repeated downtime where you can't use systems when they're needed - you may be recognizing that your systems aren't meeting the needs of your business.
These are simply four broad categories of events that may cause you to be considering major changes or investments in your people, processes, and systems. While you're evaluating your options, the time is right to ask even more questions about the relative value to your organization of keeping your e-mail platforms in-house. Perhaps you could skip an entire cycle of capital expense that each of these events will likely bring to your organization. Maybe shifting the burden of maintenance, support, patching, and upgrading out of your hands would allow you to focus on things of higher strategic value. There may be value in shifting to consistent and predictable operational expenses versus the variable costs that you have today.
There are many considerations and each business will answer questions differently in their evaluation process. It is important that a business must have a defined process for performing this evaluation and is prepared to look at all sides of the issue with open minds towards looking for new and innovative solutions to common challenges and events.
CloudStrategies is an organization that is dedicated to helping organizations identify the right questions and evaluation criteria that a business must look at to make an informed decision about the viability of cloud based solutions for many IT infrastructure systems and platforms.