Once you determine that there’s a clear case for your business to move to the cloud, we encourage you to start planning a move sooner rather than later. Not moving to the cloud when there’s every reason to do so can have a negative impact in several ways.
Stifled Growth
Owning and maintaining on-site IT resources generally costs more than having them in the cloud. Keep in mind that traditional IT spending can siphon away funds that you could otherwise use to expand your business – open a new office, hire a new employee or launch a new marketing campaign, for example.
Risk of Business Disruption
If your IT resources are on-site, what happens to your business in the event of a fire, hurricane or other calamity? Your risk of business disruption is much higher if your applications and data are in the path of disaster instead of in the cloud.
Inability to Work Remotely
On-site IT keeps people tethered to the office, interfering with their productivity and making it harder to achieve work/life balance. This not only negatively affects current employees, it also makes it harder to attract top job candidates in a tough hiring environment.
Loss of Competitive Advantage
If you don’t take advantage of the flexibility and agility that the cloud affords, you can be sure your competition will. And if it allows them to respond more quickly and effectively to opportunity, it’s less likely to turn out well for you.
Not all of these consequences are measurable in hard dollar costs; some represent more indirect costs. But when you consider the relatively inexpensive monthly cost of a complete cloud services solution (about $150-$175 per user for most of our clients – including the cost of managed services), the cost of not moving can be pretty steep.
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Bill McCharen, COO
Our goal for this blog is to answer the questions you ask. If you have any questions about cloud computing or any other topic please email me at [email protected]. To learn more about IT subscribe to our blog.
