Moving IT services to the cloud can save you money

The run-up to Christmas means a short month trading in December, and January usually means scarcity as people try to make savings following the hedonism of the winter holidays.

With April not far off, most businesses start thinking about budgets for the new financial year, which means more headaches even after the hangovers have faded into memory. In these harsh economic climes, people need to be paying more attention to costs incurred by their businesses, and to which cost-cutting measures will be effective without affecting the core trade.

Economic predictions are looking shaky at best. While it can appear to be a financial risk to outsource your operations, keeping your IT spend in-house can mean much higher bills.

The rising cost of electricity is hitting the news a lot recently, and these prices are only going to climb higher. Not only that, but once you have paid the initial investment for your hardware and software, you then have to consider the maintenance.

How much will that set you back? What about the middle-of-life upgrade that you forgot to consider? These hidden costs can set you back 50 per cent of the initial outlay again, every time.

The technology industry is a rapidly changing field. Knowing what to invest in and what is going to end up falling by the wayside is another challenge facing businesses today.

Legacy PBX telephone systems are becoming redundant and hugely expensive to maintain in offices up and down the country, but people are often worried about switching to newer methods of telecommunication. Without technical expertise, how do you know what technology to invest in and what to ignore?

When you invest in new infrastructure and software that is supposed to streamline your business, you also have to look at the cost of training your staff members to use this equipment to its full potential.

Then there’s troubleshooting, bug fixes, patches. That doesn’t even take into account the unexpected costs, such as replacing Uninterruptible Power Supply components every five to ten years. There is a tendency in businesses to under invest in IT, which can lead to issues with scalability later on.

Here at InTechnology, we are helping people to really get to grips with the complexities surrounding total cost of ownership.

By moving your IT services to the cloud and getting rid of redundant and old technology, replacing it with colocation, unified communications and cloud software, you can remove the headache of capital outlay and transfer your large Capex costs to much more manageable and scalable Opex costs.

Plus, by switching to the right supplier, you can switch to better levels of customer service, support and ongoing investment, circumventing those maintenance costs and huge initial outlays.

Stefan Haase, Divisional Product Director – Cloud Services.