Cloud computing in all its glory is one of the most effective cost cutting tools ever forged. It cuts the expenditure down from the roots i.e. cellular level up until the overall enterprise level. With cloud computing, you can reap the benefits of such business cost cutting from the get-go. Think of cloud computing as your virtual wife and you’ll get the picture.
How to Lower Your Business Costs With Cloud Computing
Pay-As-You-Go Mantra
This is analogous to the electricity meters connected to our houses. With cloud computing, there are never any pre-defined monthly rentals. You pay for exactly what to use and how much you use.
There are no additional recurring charges for any extra facilities like larger storage space or higher bandwidth.
You basically rent resources from your service provider mitigating the costs from unused resources or applications.
Moreover, there is no need to pay for client access as that feature is automatically provided to all the verified members of your organization.
Reduced Personnel Costs
You can replace that ‘reduced’ with negligible and it will still hold true. This is because not only your IT personnel is reduced to a bare minimum, it is almost non existential. You can get rid of your entire IT staff and still be successfully running your business via your cloud service provider.
Overall automation of the company transforms the whole budget scenario by a great deal as some tasks which were previously performed by people, are now undertaken by machines on the cloud.
Hence, the personnel budget is cut down to the very core.
Nullifying Capital Costs and Tax Savings
As soon as you turn to cloud services, capital investment is no longer your headache. This renders the traditional method where you run your own servers obsolete.
It provides you with the audacity to say that you’re running a company with 0 capital expenditure.
It not only saves expenses, it transforms the way accounting happens. Reduction in inventory automatically induces tax savings.
Cloud computing incurs a periodical fee which is considered as operating expense and hence doesn’t have to be liquidated unlike the conventional method where buying servers, setting up offices needs to be liquidated over a period of years.
Helping your business to manage your books is the best new year present you’re ever gonna get!
Reduced Hardware Costs
The era of humungous IT legacy hardware investments has reached its expiration date.
- Limits hardware purchasing costs and simultaneously reduces installation prices.
- It successfully reduces the maintenance and repair costs. By shifting to a cloud, you can phase out equipment which require a high level of maintenance and control repair costs.
- BYOD [ Bring Your Own Device]- You don’t have to necessarily pay for your staff’s workplaces or computers as the high grade portability provided by cloud computing makes sure that your entire personnel is active on the cloud through their mobile phones, tablets, laptops etc.
Reduced Energy and Power Costs
Getting down to basics, you will use less electricity and better hardware utility significantly improves your power usage. This occurs when there are no longer any idle servers or unused resources which is a common occurrence when you’re dealing with your own servers.
A virtualized data center has a smaller footprint than the conventional standard data centers enabling your business to cut down energy usage.
Since everything is virtualized, paper costs are mitigated as everything is handled on the cloud. There is no need for those hefty hard copies anymore. This indirectly affects the environment in a positive way.
Ergo, moving to a cloud automatically makes your organization a green one.
Indirect Cost Savings
In additional to all these direct obvious cost savings, cloud computing also plays an indirect hand when it comes to reducing your business costs.
- Productivity – By providing easy to use SaaS applications, it improves the productivity of your workforce which increases the revenue making your business cost effective.
- Deployment– Your system deployment occurs in a flash when you shift to a cloud. Hence that time saving can be utilized by your staff to work rather than wait.
- Data availability – With automated backups, dual backups, recovery schemes and multiple redundancies you never have to worry about permanent data loss. Hence huge investments on data security are avoided.
- Application availability – All application updates and upgrades occur automatically without any invoked trigger. This leads to a huge reduction in downtime and system overhead.
For large businesses, even an hour of downtime can lead to potential losses in millions.
Conclusion
Cloud computing will substantially increase the difference in the amount of money you make and the amount that goes into your organization as a whole.
So you know, Cost efficiency is there for the taking via cloud computing.
Josephine Clark, Editor at Hosted QuickBooks DotNet spends considerable part of her time in writing about technology including QuickBooks cloud hosting and Hosted PBX. When not writing, she loves to dig deeper into knowing the best and the latest technology in industry.
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