Businesses have been recently inundated with sales pitches about the technical benefits of cloud computing. But GB reveals how the move can save money.
Businesses have been recently inundated with sales pitches about the technical benefits of cloud computing. But GB reveals how the move can save money.
Greg Roach, director at private equity group Commercial Chameleons, brought in cloud capabilities that allowed him to spend half as much as he did on the previous server-based infrastructure.
‘We were spending around £20,000 a year, and that’s without taking account additional costs such as support and downtime,’ he says.
Roach had previously been running VPNs on mobile devices and bringing in cloud afforded him the flexibility of scaleable costs based on the amount of storage held, meaning just £50-100 per month on storage, together with a seat license of around £10 per month per user. ‘This system made forecasting going forward really easy for us; we know exactly what our IT expenditure and storage cost is, irrespective of how many users we have or how much storage we add,’ he says.
The cost of drastically reducing downtime can’t be measured. Scott Liversidge, managing partner of recruitment specialist Flame Health, consistently saw such an issue arising. ‘We have a database of 100,000 people and if you can’t actually access and liaise with them you’ve got big problems,’ he says.
The company was forking out more than £5,000 per month on its own hardware, wide area network, and onsite servers. After bringing on cloud functionality, the bill shrank to under £3,000 per month.
‘Initially we had some reservations about moving to cloud, some people had been talking about it being slow, dated appearance and restrictive compared to having your own infrastructure, but it has been cost-efficient for us,’ says Liversidge.
Such financial benefits of switching to the cloud are numerous, says Clive Longbottom, service director at business and IT analysts Quocirca, and range from energy savings to avoiding maintenance costs. ‘With cloud, you’re not maintaining the hardware, that service is included in subscription costs,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to pay licenses for operating systems. Also, if you are small enough as a company to have five servers or less, it’s unlikely you’re going to be able to afford the skills that are required to run them successfully. Overall, everything becomes far more predictable than doing things internally.’
What we gained from this was also bonuses like local security and remote backup, things we’d liked to have implemented before but wouldn’t have spend the extra money on.’
