May 24, 2017

POST WRITTEN BY

Zach Lanich

Owner/CTO of weCreate -- Website Design & Marketing, head of development, creative and all our internal systems.

As technology leaders, we’re challenged with making decisions that affect our bottom line and growth, and our two main goals in doing so are solving problems and staying under budget.

Keeping those goals in mind, let’s introduce some of the cloud-hosted possibilities. The cloud is comprised of numerous servers (computers) in data centers, similar to what you may use internally for document storage. Cloud services use this power and flexibility to replace your need for maintaining on-premise software applications. Some examples include project management (Mavenlink), customer relationship management (Salesforce), email (G Suite) and document signing (PandaDoc).

Many companies build or buy complex and often subpar software and maintain it internally. This makes moving to the cloud all the more worth considering. So why move?

Your Bottom Line Will Love You

Gartner’s IT Budget report shows that healthcare companies often spend nearly 75% of their IT budgets on maintaining internal systems. Companies in all sectors often get caught up in the upfront price of software and fail to realize the total cost of ownership (support, additional hardware, etc.). Cloud services allow you to pay for the resource usage you need while taking advantage of scale and reliability, two things that most companies can’t afford internally. And there’s no need to update software internally since this is handled automatically.

Most business owners know that spreading the cost of large purchases out over time is more beneficial in the long run since a budget can be spent appropriately on marketing and other needs for company growth. Cloud services operate on a subscription model, where your cost is based on usage over time, preventing you from spending all of your budget at once.

For more examples of how the cloud has saved companies (and even entire states) a lot of money, see Rackspace’s 2016 white paper “The Business Value of Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting” and IBM’s  2015 article “United States of Cloud saves states millions of dollars.”