The cloud offers economies of scale, and a more flexible approach to leveraging and scaling resources that help businesses streamline their IT spend.
The cloud has a great deal of potential for modern businesses – it offers superb flexibility, scalability, and opportunities to integrated other cutting edge solutions like edge computing, AI, and the Internet of Things. One of the biggest benefits it can have for an organisation is the potential for reductions in a business’ IT spend. We discussed this with TechQuarters, a London-based managed IT services company. TechQuarters has provided IT support for Accountants, and many other types of businesses, and from that experience they have a great deal of insight into how different models of IT can cost the average businesses. They stated that cloud computing offers the greatest potential for cost-savings. Below are some of the examples of how the cloud can help businesses streamline their IT budgets.
- Power Savings
An important consideration about how much a business’ IT is costing them in an ongoing way is how much it costs to power the IT solutions the business uses. For example, if a business is using servers and storage arrays in their office, they need to be powering them 24/4, which can rack up to being a lot of ongoing spending. On the other hand, cloud resources are sourced from a public cloud provider, who are responsible for running the datacentres that support their services – and powering large-scale infrastructure tends to be more economical than running smaller on-premise infrastructure. Therefore, not only are businesses saving on the power that they would need to run their servers, but their cloud provider is passing savings onto them.
- Fewer Capital Expenses
Traditional IT spending was largely focuses with capital expense – in other words, upfront investment. According to TechQuarters – whose work providing IT support for schools have given them insight into the various different costs of IT models –cloud infrastructure is undeniably cheaper than on-premise infrastructure. This is because it shifts infrastructure into a business’ operational expenses, rather than demanding capital expenses. Instead of having to invest large amounts of money upfront for their technology, businesses can pay a subscription to access all the cloud resources they need.
- Eliminate Redundancy Plans
Following on from the previous point, businesses can save money with the cloud can adopting a more tailored usage model, which can eliminate the need for redundancy plans. The nature of the cloud means that data is never tied down to a single location. In other words, a business’ infrastructure is not vulnerable to the same risks as conventional, on-premises infrastructure – therefore, redundancy is not necessary.
Redundancy requires businesses to back upeverything and store it on infrastructure they pay for themselves – therefore, it can be a highly expensive solution. The cloud can be leveraged for a more cost-effective means of backing up.
- Pay For What You Use
A big difference between cloud-based infrastructure and traditional infrastructures is that, with a traditional infrastructure, you have to pay for more than what you use. This is largely due to the fact that investing in just enough resource to support workloads will not be sufficient to support fluctuations in usage and demand, and it also will just mean that you will just have to invest in more resources to account for increased demand during periods of growth.
According to TechQuarters, much of the outsourced IT support London businesses get from involved optimising client’s infrastructure usage. Cloud computing enables this because it is scalable, meaning when businesses need more resources, it takes less than a day to activate those extra resources.
