For small business owners building and supporting a baseline IT infrastructure that provides reliable 24/7 services to you and your customers can be expensive. Poorly supported infrastructure also can be a budget breaker.
Large capital expenditures, high fixed-labor costs, and endless spending for upgrades don’t have to be your fate. Cloud computing offers small business owners a way out! it can not only save money, but it but eliminate headaches and can spur growth and boost profits. Here are a few ways the cloud can help your business.
Capital Expenditures
Many of the expenses of hardware can disappear into the cloud. Servers, cabling, all the redundant equipment needed for backups can be handled by a cloud Service provider. More importantly, if you need to ramp up quick for an unexpected surge in business, a cloud service provider can easily accommodate your demands as needed.
Disaster recovery simplified
While you always need disaster recovery plans, the biggest head- aches disappear. When you handle everything in-house, considerable expenditures arise if you want high reliability. Redundant equipment, fully loaded with software is required in case of hardware failure.
Uninterruptible power supplies to support the full load of all your servers and backups can be extraordinarily expensive. And even if you keep a lot of your infrastructure on-site, the cloud can be used as a reliable data backup system.
Labor Costs
The cloud can cut and/or re-allocate your IT labor costs. The benefits of the cloud in the area of IT resources are twofold.
First, you eliminate the need for 24/7 resources to support your infrastructure. Even if you have only minimal in-house support, emergency on-call break/fix services come at very high hourly rates, and cannot always respond fast enough to eliminate downtime.
Of course, your cloud fees include the labor needed to support your infrastructure, but you are sharing that labor cost with all the other renters. Economies of scale really step in when it comes to labor, and this is a condition a small business can’t create on its own.
Second, when you migrate to the cloud, your in-house IT resources can be re-directed to strategic IT planning for future growth and boost profit. This staff can now be used for innovation, not just housekeeping.
Energy savings
And finally, the cloud isn't blue- It's green. While big server farms use enormous amounts of energy, they are a more efficient method than equipment dispersed in offices worldwide.
Other Benefits
As you move your IT into the cloud, some unseen expenses go away. The extra office space that houses equipment no longer needs to be leased, or can be used to house other revenue producing resources, like a few new salespeople. The electric power to drive it all doesn’t come free, and the cooling power to keep everything from overheating is often an overlooked cost of in-house infrastructure.
In summary, the cloud lets you save money, move it to more strategic uses, and direct your energies and capital to boost profits and growth, not infrastructure support.
Business Knowledge Systems is Your Cloud Expert
Chicago managed IT services provider BKS Systems is a local leader in setting up and managing cloud computing systems for small businesses. We have nearly 20 years of experience in managing the IT for companies in the logistics, healthcare, banking and professional services field.
If your small business is ready to take the next step into cloud computing, contact us today for a consultation!
