I have been delivering business cards to local businesses offering Cloud IT Services. Often the unspoken question is
“Are you asking me for money?’
Followed quickly by:
“Can you save me money?’
Of course the answer is: It depends! I would like to shout out “YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT” but that’s probably not helpful. Instead I decided to write this blog “Saving Money with The Cloud”.
Most businesses I speak to face many pressures and the last thing on their mind is IT. They are concerned about getting new business, managing staff, their premises costs, managing their current workload effectively… the list goes on.
So here are FIVE reasons to think about your business and Cloud IT Solutions.
Continuity
Taking the most obvious reasons for spending on IT first, we need to talk about failure. What happens when it all goes wrong? You have data saved on your laptop or a local server and it breaks. Do you have a backup? Do you know how to access your backup? Will you be reliant on someone visiting your business to fix the problem? What will that cost?
We can level this up too… what happens when the company you rely on to supply your backup solution fails to deliver? Do you want to wait until there is a disaster to find out if your solution is effective? Most companies seem to be happy to operate with this head in the sand approach. The truth is that backing up to Cloud is likely to be either a necessary extra expense (if you have no valuable backup solution today) or a cost saving (if your current backup solution is anywhere other than in The Cloud). So the answer here is “Yes I can save you money.”
Growth
If you need to expand for any reason you should think Cloud. If you take on staff how will you communicate and share data? Do you need more space for more data? The Cloud might be the cheapest option and will remove your need to spend cash on new hardware.
Money Management
Maybe this should be the number 1 reason to move to Cloud? With Cloud Services you pay for what you use. Its easy to budget. There are no unexpected bills. Any Cloud support costs should be 100% transparent with no surprises.
Security
The next thing we need to discuss is “Security”. IT Security is such a massive topic, whole books are written about it and anything I write here could only gloss over one of the most important IT topics. Suffice it to say that lots of small companies imagine that this is not an issue for them. Until you ask them what their competitors could do with their customer list… or what they could do with their competitors list of contacts. Security IS an issue for EVERYONE.
Some imagine that the least secure place for their data is on the cloud but I suggest you look at it this way: If I were to post your data where everyone can see it, such as on a billboard, what would we need to do with that data to keep it secure. Then answer is to encrypt it. Secrecy has come a long way since you were a child. We don’t just swap the letters around or write it in lemon juice. Very complex encryption techniques are available to all of us. By utilizing this technology we can choose precisely who should see what data whilst making it available easily.
We don’t just swap the letters around
or write it in lemon juice.
Improving your business
For some companies there is a clear benefit in improving their IT. Yes you can save money by introducing efficiency to your business. Good IT choices can drive better business decisions. Even very small businesses should be tech-aware. Whether its digital marketing, a better website or sharing data with customers YOU can improve your business by making good IT choices.
For larger customers, adopting Cloud best practices can make you reach your market faster, change quicker and allow you to become more agile. Business growth is often driven by disrupting the status quo. Will you be disrupting or disrupted?