Cloud computing has taken the business world
by storm. It wasn’t so long ago that businesses had to pay in-house technicians
good money to design, research, and purchase all the hardware needed to run an
onsite server. This is an expensive endeavor, and for a small business may not
always be at the top of a list of priorities. Today, cloud computing can solve
that problem (and many more), but if you don’t closely manage your cloud costs,
it can end up wasting capital. Today, we will look at cloud computing’s
tendency for organizations to go overboard on their cloud offerings.
Do you need communications tools? Check.
Hosted-VoIP and email.
Do you need processing power? Check.
Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service.
Do you need applications and storage? Check.
Software as a Service and hosted Storage.
The truth is that anything you can do with
onsite hardware, you can accomplish with cloud resources that are billed per
user, per month; or, per gigabyte.
In the cloud, you can quickly deliver your
business functionality, redundancy, and everything else that it needs to be
effective. It works great for full-time, part-time, and temporary workers,
alike; and, can be leveraged quickly, with only short setup processes before it
is a viable, and mostly secure tool.
The drawbacks of cloud computing, especially
in environments that are hosted by an outside service provider, are typically
caught up in the lack of control your organization has over the hardware
itself. Businesses can choose to create onsite “private” cloud systems that return
the large capital costs to the company, but provide controls and management
over their hardware systems as well as the accessibility needed to remotely
access the system, among the other superlative aspects that cloud access brings
to an organization's IT.
One of the major drawbacks is, ironically,
cost. Since the IT infrastructure used to run the solutions is housed and
managed by the service provider, they price solutions accordingly. If your
organization needs 30 cloud licenses, the solution could get costly quick.
What’s worse, if you have people leave your employ, and you don’t reactively
cancel the cloud solution before your monthly license is up, you will be on the
hook for the cost of the monthly fee.
If this doesn’t seem like a costly scenario,
think about the times when you assemble teams that work on projects. These
projects require three or four cloud-based applications and other resources. If
each member of a project team is costing the business hundreds of dollars a
month in software, a month or two paying for solutions for a large team that
has all but wrapped up its project just decimates the ROI of the project.
In order to ensure that you aren’t paying for cloud-based resources that you don’t need to pay for, having a strategy in place to manage all of your organization’s cloud-based resources is important. At Emerge, we have a tried-and-true system to ensure that your cloud resources are managed and that you aren’t paying for more than you need to. Call us today at 859-746-1030 for more information.