Cloud-based software may be governing a lot of things in the market right now, but according to Dell’s 2013 Case for Corporate Email, only 9% of businesses have moved to an exclusively cloud-based solution, and 44% have no cloud-based support whatsoever. There are a number of fears and difficulties that could be responsible for this, but for those who are on the fence, here are three benefits that you’ll notice immediately.
Cost
Servers are expensive, there’s no way around that—what’s more is that all hardware has a 100% failure rate, so eventually you’ll be putting that expensive technology out to pasture and continuing the cycle with another massive purchase. Outside of the initial cost though, there are a laundry list of expenses associated with keeping email servers in-house
- Power to run servers 24/7
- Network switches
- Batteries for backups
- Backup power generators
- Cost of technician labor
- Hardware replacement
Extraneous costs like these can fly under the radar, but they add up!
“Google Apps was only half the cost of using a self-managed Exchange server. When we calculated the ROI, we discovered Apps would pay for itself in only 18 months.” —Michael Cross, CIO, Greenleaf Hospitality Group
It may seem easier to present a one-time cost of a server, and billable time of your staff, but when those numbers are exposed and compared to the cost per user of a cloud solution, you might find a better match for your organization’s budget. When the City of Orlando calculated their total cost per seat for their organization at $133/year, and compared that to seats at $50/year under Google Apps, it played a major role in their decision to migrate.
Time
If your organization goes through on-premise hardware in a cyclical pattern, you’re probably accustomed to the lengthy, tedious process of moving data from one server to the other. Not to mention all the time in between those cycles, maintaining on-premise hardware, backing up data, keeping the network mapped correctly.
After migrating to a cloud-based solution, those time investments are no longer a burden on your in-house IT team. Instead, those efforts are handled by a 3rd party, like Google, with an entire team dedicated to maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting, and leaving your technicians more time to focus on proactive goals instead of server upkeep.
Security
According to Rackspace’s State of the Cloud 2014, 94% of organizations working with cloud solutions report a heightened level of data security. So why does security remain a chief concern among businesses reluctant to migrate away from on-premise solutions? Kevin Roberts, CIO at Abilene Christian University, suggests it isn’t a tangible lack of security, so much as a lack of control, in this interview with University Business:
“One way to do that is to control everything yourself, but those concerns are more emotional than rational. It is like feeling that your money will be safer in your mattress than in the bank. The bank is really better at keeping your money safe than you are. And Google is better at email than we are.”
Google is fully aware of how critical security is to their adoption by customers, and they don’t shy away from details—they have data centers all over the globe designed around high security, and because they can focus their design to a large scale (and a large team of maintenance staff), they’re able to address vulnerabilities and accessibility issues quickly.
If you’re still working with an on-premise solution and you’re ready to…
- Put tedious server expenses under a microscope
- Let your technicians leave the server stacks to pursue more value-driving goals, and
- Put security in the hands of highly-trained cloud providers
…then it may be worth your time to investigate what cloud solutions have to offer.
Read on with this case study on an 800+ user organization who made the leap.
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