Why move to the cloud? There are plenty of good reasons, but mainly it makes good business sense. You can call it efficiency, or call it doing more with less. But whichever spin you prefer, cloud computing lets you focus on what's important: your business.
Read on to discover why moving to the cloud will save you money in five ways...
1. Fully utilized hardware
Workload fluctuation is a reality for almost any company and cloud computing takes the responsibility of dealing with that off your back. This way, your workloads will share server infrastructure with other organizations' computing needs. This allows the cloud-computing provider to optimize the hardware needs of its data centers, which means lower costs for you.
2. Lower power costs
Cloud computing uses less electricity. Better hardware utilization means more efficient power use. When you run your own data center, your servers won't be fully-utilized (unless yours is a very unusual organization). Idle servers waste energy. So a cloud service provider can charge you less for energy used than you're spending in your own data center.
3. Lower people costs
For most companies, the staffing budget is usually the biggest single line item; it often makes up more than half of the total. Why so high? Good IT people are expensive. When you move to the cloud, some of the money you pay for the service goes to the provider's staffing costs. But it's typically a much smaller amount than if you did all that work in-house.
(In case you worry that moving to the cloud means firing good workers, don't. Many organizations that move to cloud computing find they can redeploy their scarce, valuable IT people resources to areas that make more money for the business.)
4. Zero capital costs
When you run your own servers, you're looking at up-front capital costs. But in the world of cloud-computing, financing that capital investment is someone else's problem.
5. Resilience without redundancy
When you run your own servers, you need to buy more hardware than you need in case of failure. Having spare hardware lying idle, "just in case," is an expensive way to maximize uptime.
Instead, why not let a cloud computing service deal with the redundancy requirement? Typical clouds have several locations for their data centers, and they mirror your data and applications across at least two of them. That's a less expensive way of doing it, and another way to enjoy the cloud's economies of scale.