1. No capital expenses
Given that businesses always keep a close eye on spending, it’s never easy to have new IT hardware purchases approved. Moving to the cloud can eliminate bureaucracy. Financial managers need to budget asset purchases and these typically pass through a few people to get approved.
Cloud services are a utility and are billed monthly based on usage. Usage is a cost that is expensed every month instead of an asset that is depreciated over a period of time. Capital is not tied up and can better be used for other aspects of the business.
2. Quickly and flexibly add resources
Business computing demands can change quickly. The launch of a new business application, running a major web marketing campaign, or need more disk storage for a project , these types of events require IT agility. The cloud can support these demands and more. Given that some of these projects may only be temporary or usage is seasonal, you can take advantage of the elasticity of cloud services. Turn them on when you need them, turn them off when they are not needed. And to top that, you only pay for what you use.
3. Limited IT Staff
It is not uncommon to have a small IT team to look after a disproportionate number of users. Deploying to the cloud allows your team to take advantage of the expertise of the cloud provider. Cloud providers provide a control centre that gives you control of all your cloud assets at your fingertips.
4. Ease of Deployment
Take for example the task of provisioning servers. What may traditionally take hours can be done in a few minutes. Need to deploy a CMS quickly, pre-built images exist for the most popular tools and application and can easily be deployed with a few clicks.
5. Your servers never get obsolete
Gone will be the days of worrying that the servers you have just acquired will be obsolete in a few years. Doing a hardware refresh will be a thing of the past.
6. Value
Using the economies of scale of cloud providers you take advantage of their size to derive better value for your data infrastructure requirements. Some studies report that you have to deploy over 5000 servers to even just achieve similar per-server marginal costs as the cloud providers.
7. The Cloud is Green
Cloud Datacentres from the largest providers are designed for efficiency. Energy waste is minimised and material waste is also greatly reduced since the enterprise uses less hardware. Internal servers are typically run at 10-20% and yet operate with nearly a consistent energy usage. Smaller companies will enjoy the most savings when moving to the cloud as they tend to have the most inefficient IT services.
In the end, the most important reason to keep in mind when considering moving to the the cloud is that these are still just tools that need to be used to enhance business value. Azure will help you focus on your business and generating revenue rather than the infrastructure that you run it on. Contact us now to find out how you can take advantage of Azure.