Moving to the cloud can save your business money. Here’s how.

By Robert Marston, Global Head of Product at SEACOM

To remain agile in an evolving market, organisations in all sectors are revising budgets and business plans. Cloud technology, with its cost- and time-saving benefits, couldn’t come at a better time for companies looking to preserve business continuity, build enterprise resilience and save money. It’s claimed that cloud computing is 40 times more cost-effective than running an in-house IT system. Here’s where these savings come from.

Reduced hardware and software costs

When partnering with a reputable cloud provider like SEACOM, you are essentially freeing your business from costly hardware upgrades and maintenance expenses, superfluous or outdated infrastructure, as well as ongoing software licensing costs. No more worrying about keeping the server room cool, or even having a server room at all! The responsibility is now on your cloud provider to optimise their infrastructure across all their clients, leaving you to focus on your core business.

Fewer IT resources

Traditionally, the size of an organisation’s computing capacity had to be matched by the size of the team administrating and supporting it. Moving to the cloud reduces the need for an entire desktop support team, as users are upskilled to understand the new systems and applications themselves.

At a small business level, a lot of those skills would have had to be brought in, and finding a reliable IT support partner can be a challenge. The cloud lets smaller businesses access services they wouldn’t have been able to access previously.

Pay-as-you-go

The cloud economy is based on a simple consumption-based model: you only pay for what you use. This way, you save money and also gain greater flexibility in being able to scale your needs rapidly up and down – both now and in the future. Gone are the days where a company has either overestimated its growth and overspent on IT hardware or, conversely, has not anticipated demand and scrambles to procure and install the necessary IT hardware to support it.

Increased productivity

Cloud computing also comes with speed and convenience benefits. At any given time, an employee can access their work remotely and continue to deliver seamlessly from anywhere. Additionally, cloud services are generally faster than other localised computing infrastructure, which means that changes are implemented faster, tasks are completed quicker, and teams are freed up to produce more.

The cost of not moving

Not moving to the cloud can end up costing you far more in the long run as the cloud makes disaster recovery and business continuity much easier. Imagine this scenario, all too common in South Africa: your business servers get stolen over the weekend, and, come Monday, no one can do any work. To make matters worse, the IT manager forgot to do the back-up on Friday, and now you’ve lost a week of work (and a week’s worth of business). Companies that don’t have the skills or processes in place to ensure business continuity should move their data to the cloud and eliminate the risks that physical servers pose. Just make sure your cloud provider is committed to good cloud security!

Ultimately, a move to the cloud makes the most financial sense for both the short and long term by reducing costs and complexity. A local cloud provider like SEACOM offers needs-based cloud solutions – you might be surprised by how much cheaper our offering is than those from international providers. And for organisations that remain cloud agnostic, SEACOM offers lift and shift solutions whereby we host and run a company’s existing platform and infrastructure.

Click here to find out more about our small business cloud solutions, or here if you’re looking for cloud solutions for bigger enterprises.