3 Ways Cloud Computing Saves You Big Money

If you’re a business owner, there’s probably one thing above all else you’ve heard about why you should supposedly switch to the cloud— “you’ll save money.” But let’s be honest—that’s really not a good enough explanation, especially if you’re a bit more old-school and not so eager to give up physical control over your phone networks, business software, or file storage.

Switching to the cloud requires a fundamental change in your mindset, and “you’ll save money” isn’t good enough. It’s important to know how and why the cloud delivers those substantial savings to your business. When you dig a little deeper, though, you might be surprised at how much you could save.

From our perspective, there are three major mechanisms through which cloud phone and computing drives major cost savings:

One: By allowing for a shift from capital expenditure to operating expenditure.

Depending on the size and scale of your organization, a fancy new phone system might set you back tens of thousands of dollars by the time it’s installed, wired, and connected. Same deal if your server or data center is on its last legs and needs an upgrade. Hardware is crazy expensive, and requires a significant one-time investment of capital to acquire and set up. Plus, you can’t always predict when those upgrades will suddenly become very necessary.

Cloud solutions ditch the capital expense entirely and get you on a low monthly rate. They become an operating expense rather than a capital expense, which means cost savings, easier budgeting, and no unwelcome surprises.

Two: By lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) of technology.

Okay, so you dropped the cash and bought yourself some fancy, expensive hardware and got everything installed. But just because you’re done “paying” for it doesn’t mean, you know, you’re actually done paying for it. Even if you aren’t paying a monthly fee to a cloud provider, you’re still paying operating costs on your technology. You pay the electricity needed to run the equipment. You pay to support, service, and maintain the equipment. You pay your IT staff overtime to fix it when something goes wrong. And when that something does go wrong, you pay for the resulting downtime and time-to-market delays it incurs.

When you consider all these hidden (and not-so-hidden) costs, owning your own tech starts to look like a bad deal if IT isn’t one of your core business services. By contrast, since you don’t have to buy, host, or service your cloud technology, you don’t have to worry about these costs.

Three: By lowering the opportunity cost of running technology and allowing renewed focus on core business activities.

Good IT people are critical for the health of any modern business. They’re also expensive, and when they’re spending 80 percent of their days caring for phones or servers, it represents a significant labor cost (not to mention mental energy) dedicated to just maintaining the status quo—rather than, you know, growing your business. You don’t want your people running on a proverbial treadmill. You want them pushing your business forward!

Storage, network, infrastructure, hardware—making all these work for you is a significant yet necessary challenge. But they probably have nothing to do with your core widget-selling operation. They are the generic challenges faced by any business in any industry. When you go to the cloud, you let your cloud service company, which is specially trained to deal with these challenges effectively, take over the work, and you allow your own people to focus on making the best widgets they possibly can.

Bonus: the cloud solutions are often better, faster, and more reliable than the owned infrastructure that they replace. So, it’s not just your IT team that sees the benefit. Every worker in your company can gain increased productivity.

Making Your Switch to the Cloud as Painless (and Cost Effective) as Possible

Okay, so we’ve sold you—maybe it’s time for your business to begin investigating cloud solutions for your telecom infrastructure. Where do you begin?

You begin with a call to TelDesigns in Holland, MI. We understand the industry inside and out and have relationships with dozens of companies, providers, and vendors so that you don’t have to take time finding them. Our consult, design, connect philosophy has helped businesses all around West Michigan and beyond:

• Consult with your business so that we fully understand your business, your industry, your goals, your need, and your pain points.
• Design available cloud, voice, and network solutions—using our in-depth knowledge of available providers and services—that offer you exceptional results for the best price.
• Connect you to those services by coordinating the implementation and providing support long after the point of sale.

To learn more, check us out on teldesigns.com or give us a call at (616) 965-2030. You can also connect with us on social media via Facebook and LinkedIn.