Control IT Costs

Moving to the cloud will help control and reduce IT costs. Typically 70 to 80 percent of IT budgets are dedicated to maintaining and supporting the existing technical environment. Once you transition to a cloud computing environment, many of these resources will no longer be necessary and can be refocused to support key business initiatives. In addition, cloud computing services are typically subscription based - requiring that you pay only for the resources you actually use. This provides you with predictable costs for IT services and alleviates the large drain on capital and technical resources that results from the frequent, and often unanticipated, upgrades to software and infrastructure required by on-premise solutions.

There are many well documented examples of the savings companies have realized as a result of implementing cloud-based solutions. Recent research from Andrew McAfee of the MIT Sloan School of Management supports this notion and focuses, specifically, on the savings that small and medium-sized businesses can expect with cloud-based solutions. McAfee's research was done in collaboration with Google and Analysis Group.

The research focused on SMBs because they aren't as constrained by their investment in legacy technology as large enterprises are. This allows them to choose the technology that works best for them and results in SMBs being on the leading edge of trends in enterprise computing. McAfee's research included savings estimates for companies ranging in size from 1-500 employees. The greatest savings were realized by companies with 1-15 employees. These companies were able to reduce IT expenses by 71 percent by moving to the cloud. In larger companies, the savings that resulted from moving to the cloud were not as large, but still represented a 44 percent reduction in IT costs.