To Cloud or Not to Cloud
Cloud Computing Cost Savings Made Simple
Cloud Computing Cuts Costs Short & Long Term
There are several key areas in which savings will be created as you move to a cloud computing environment.
Capital Investments
Computer equipment, such as servers and storage devices, become old and outdated in just a few years, so many companies purchase or lease new equipment periodically. Moving to a cloud computing environment eliminates the need to make many of these investments.
Electrical Power
Depending upon the size of your company and your current computer network you may only be consuming a moderate amount of electricity to power your servers and your storage. The larger your company is, and the more hardware you house on your own premises, the more this is costing and so the more you will save.
High Volume Air
Conditioning
Desktop computers are designed to be comfortable where people are comfortable, but the same is not true of servers and large storage devices. They require a cool climate that demands high-volume air conditioning (HVAC) which can be a very expensive proposition.
Real Estate
Another cost that is directly proportionate to the size of your network is the size of the space required to house it all. Your company may only require a closet, or perhaps a small room. But when you begin to grow and need your network to scale with you, expect space to become the final frustrating frontier.
Personnel
For a company like yours that isn't in the IT business it's seldom easy or inexpensive to recruit, qualify, and hire talented technical support. Since technical people by nature tend to want to keep growing their knowledge they can quickly become restless and move on, incurring even more cost to replace them.
Disaster Avoided
This is the one cost most people try very hard not to think of. What happens when your inhouse computer network crashes and you don't have a recent backup? Statistics vary, but they all cite that a major proportion of companies that suffer such an incident end up going out of business. That's the ultimate cost, and it often happens simply because nobody changed a backup tape or checked the backup log to see if it was working. That simply doesn't happen in a cloud-based data center. In fact, many cloud providers offer a guarantee of penalty compensation in the event of data loss because they are confident they'll never have to pay off on it.