4 Financial Benefits of Moving to the Cloud

So, you’ve finally decided to bring your company into the future and switch over to cloud computing.

You’ve done your due diligence: you’ve calculated the monthly costs of operating on the cloud, you have a good idea of how much it’ll cost to make the initial move to the cloud, and you’ve accounted for future costs based on growth.

But have you calculated the savings you’ll be making once you switch to the cloud?

Many organizations are so wrapped up in the financial impact of migrating that they often forget about the money they’ll be saving as a result.

Lower People Cost

Good IT people are highly skilled and don’t come cheap. Their salaries, benefits, and training all add to on-site infrastructure costs. And this doesn’t even consider the recruiting expenses you may have endured to attract top talent.

When you migrate your workloads to the cloud, some of what you pay in your monthly fees are paid to your provider’s staff. However, it’s a much lesser amount than if you were to have IT employees on hand.

Lower Power Cost

With on-site infrastructure, you need more computers, servers, workstations and cooling stations. If you grow, you’ll need more of these things which all take a significant amount of power to run. Even when everyone is gone for the weekend, your internal servers still idle 24/7 and consume power.

Alternatively, cloud computing utilizes the economies of scale - you only use the server space that you need, at the time you need. The rest of the time, the power is either shut off, or reconfigured to other organizations (that is, if you’re on the public cloud).

It’s also very likely that your cloud service provider has better, more efficient hardware than anything you’d ever own internally. And of course, more efficient hardware means more efficient power usage, where the savings are passed on to you.

Lower Maintenance Cost

Maintaining your IT infrastructure can mean high maintenance fees. You’ll have to add staff, emergency recovery, software and hardware updates, security updates, and more to your bottom line.

With cloud computing, there are zero additional maintenance costs. Your cloud service provider takes care of everything, and any maintenance has already been accounted for in your monthly fee.

Plus, there is the added bonus that the maintenance performed by a cloud service provider is almost always done seamlessly and without disruptions. If you’re maintaining your own IT infrastructure, there will be down time in your business (lost revenue).

Lower Overhead Costs

Having your own on-site infrastructure translates to you paying a huge bill to set up your hardware and software. In the world of cloud computing, you are tapping into pre-existing IT infrastructure. If you scale, you can scale your cloud services with all of the extra costs mentioned above. And who knows, maybe the money you would have spent on internal infrastructure can be reinvested back into your business for bigger and better things?

Bringing It All Together

Many organizations are so wrapped up in the financial impact of migrating that they often forget about the money they’ll be saving as a result. The cost-savings associated with people, power, maintenance and overhead can be tremendous if planned for in an effective and efficient manner.

Where else can you find financial benefits in cloud migration? Non-financial benefits? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jim Barnish is a strategic change leader with over 15 years of global and integrated operations, sales, and marketing experience. Over the course of Jim’s career, he has successfully worked with companies undergoing accelerated business development, process improvement, change management and operational transformation initiatives.