Ever since its inception in the 90s, cloud computing has made a promise of a technology that can potentially redefine the entire business landscape. These expectations were to a large extent met in the years since and cloud computing offered companies of all sizes a lean way of choosing specific services and scaling up without having to develop necessary in-house.
It was, however, the outbreak of COVID-19 and the migration of a large part of the global business landscape to remote working when this concept had an opportunity to flourish and showcase its full potential.
Keeping this newfound relevancy in mind, let us take a look at some of the most tangible financial benefits of cloud computing that should give you yet another reason to treat this technology as a new industry standard rather than a novelty.
1. Cutting the Hardware Acquisition and Maintenance Costs
Over the last couple of years, we have witnessed the tech world developing at a lightning speed. Costly hardware that is considered cutting-edge today becomes obsolete in less than a year and installation, updates, and maintenance of these machines become ever more taxing for the owners. One of the main perks of cloud computing lies in almost entirely moving this glaring problem of the table. Subscribing to a cloud integration service leaves the responsibility of upgrading, updating, and maintenance entirely in the hand of the service vendor. This kind of arrangement runs much more mileage out of your existing hardware.
2. Your Teams Can Stay Active 24/7
Following up on the topic we just talked about, cloud computing makes your staff entirely hardware-independent, or to be more precise, they don’t need access to the company’s assets to perform daily tasks. This simple fact opens the doors for a whole slew of organizational options ranging from more flexible scheduling where your staff will be able to utilize their periods of peak performance to models like telecommuting and outsourcing. Putting aside the ability to provide services to your clients 24/7, outsourcing and telecommuting also have a profound impact on the upkeep costs of your premises.
3. Abundant Outsourcing Options
Like we mentioned in the previous passage, outsourcing can lend your company some much-needed leanness and flexibility and stay competitive 24/7. However, relegating your daily tasks to remote third-party teams can also mean you can scale the company, adopt new technologies and expand to a new market with little to no growing pains. For instance, if you are planning to migrate your infrastructure to AWS (Amazon Web Services), you can hire a remote team to perform managed AWS professional services without developing this department in-house. All these things are impossible without the cloud.
4. Ramping Up Cyber Security
Over the last couple of years, innovations in cloud technology have drastically improved the security of these online platforms. These days, cloud services have made cloud protocols, applications, and online policies virtually impenetrable to some of the most common threats we can find in the virtual land. Also, these protective mechanisms come built-in into the cloud tools with no extra costs. To attain the same level of security companies would need to invest considerable amounts of money into anti-virus, firewall, and similar security apps. So, the financial benefits of cloud computing are more than evident.
5. Lower Upfront Capital Investment
All startups, regardless of their size, experience very high capital costs in the period prior to lunch and during the first year of their existence. These costs can become so overbearing that as much as 21.5% of companies fail during that crucial first year. Using cloud services is an excellent way to reduce these upfront costs and make your company more competitive in the time it needs a competitive edge the most. Also, due to their pay-as-you-go pricing model, cloud services can be easily subscribed to or canceled making the business far easier to respond to current market circumstances and become nimbler.
6. Cutting Down the Energy Costs
Last but not least, we have to mention that companies that use cloud services tend to achieve lower energy costs than the competitors who perform all the tasks in-house. The bulk of these savings are usually made by various remote working models. But, we shouldn’t overlook the expenditures made by the hardware components around the premises. Namely, achieving the necessary level of collaboration between the employees without relying on cloud tools requires the usage of internal servers that need to be active during the entire shift and in that period consume excessive amounts of power.
We hope these few mentions gave you some general idea about the financial benefits you can attain through the usage of the latest-gen cloud-based tools. Although these mentions make only a fraction of the overall perks you are getting by moving your business infrastructure online, they should be examined under very close scrutiny. The contemporary business environment is very harsh and competitive and judging by all indicators, the following year won’t bring any relief. With things as they are there is really no bad way to stay ahead of the competitors.