Reduce Small Business Computing Costs – Cloud Software Services for your company may be able to save your money for investment into other overhead expenses rather than updating servers, buying or maintaining proprietary software or paying for upgrades of both hardware and applications. Cloud Computing may be a valuable savings method for your business. The following video discusses some of the reasons and gives the example of CRM hosted apps. This is one business money saver you may consider:
Transcript:
Moving your applications to the the Cloud can save you a lot of money. The biggest immediate saving is that you no longer need to buy another server, which costs several thousand dollars to buy and many thousands more to maintain. One of the hidden costs in owning your own server is the cost of maintenance.
Servers require ongoing patches and upgrades to the operating systems and service software to keep them secure and free of software bugs. If you don’t have the IT skills to do this yourself, you need to hire an IT expert to set up and maintain your service for you. With the Cloud you don’t need the IT expert to keep your applications running.
It’s all done for you by the Cloud vendor. And with the cloud, there’s no need to buy service software either. All the expensive hardware and operating systems required to run your business applications are handled by the Cloud software provider.
The greatest benefit of Cloud computing, is it gives you computing resources on tap. Normally, a business will buy server big enough to cope with the busiest time of year. For the rest of the year, the business will have over capitalized on its IT needs as the server idles along until the two or three times a year it is really tested.
Guessing your peak demand is very difficult and more businesses get it wrong than get it right. This means they either spend too much entire precious capital in a system that is far too powerful for the needs, or they don’t spend enough. And when they need it most, the overwhelmed IT system comes grinding to a halt.
When you factor in the rising cost of electricity, the extra office space required to house a server, and the need to keep your office physically secure against fire and theft, businesses stand to save an enormous amount of time and energy, as well as money, by moving to the Cloud.
The Cloud also gives you access to expensive applications which can raise productivity. CRM is a powerful tool for small business because it can help you build a sales pipeline that will keep track of sales leads until each deal closes. It also uses analytics to forecast how many sales you will make in a month, quarter, or year.
While small business may have balked at the investment required to buy a Application and the server to run it. The Cloud makes it a cheap and easy process to try all the benefits of this software and put it into action. And like any application in the Cloud, a sales person has access to every piece of data on the road, just as in the office.
All you need is an internet connection and you can log in to the database and retrieve information required to close the sale on the spot. This means fewer trips back and forth to the office, a shorter sales cycle, and more time for your sales people to sell.
