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Reducing IT Costs
Many IT departments continue to struggle with IT inefficiency. High hardware investment costs and software upgrade barriers make traditional IT services and infrastructure look inflexible.
In this context, the economy and agility benefits of Cloud Computing mean that IT’s focus is now shifting towards a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, where content and applications are consumed ‘on-demand’ and paid for out of Operational Expenditure, rather than high up-front Capital Investment.
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Vendor Selection
The most significant risk associated with IT On-demand and Software as a Service, is the high level of trust users must place in their chosen vendor to keep the services they use up and running consistently. Downtime exposes them to not only loss of revenue, but also customers and even reputation. Customer tie-in is strong under this scenario as potentially all a company’s documentation and productivity now lies in the vendor’s hands. All of this makes choosing the right provider, preferably one with a proven track record in Cloud based IT Service delivery, absolutely crucial.
Organisational Deficiencies
Organisations that do not have clear objectives and defined business processes will not necessarily be any better off with a SaaS solution than with their existing on-premise arrangement. SaaS requires a ground-up reappraisal of how the business consumes its IT – itself a completely unique challenge for many organisations.
Licensing
While SaaS licensing has lower up-front costs, in the long run the total cost is inclined to be more expensive. However, this view overlooks the significant cost savings SaaS also delivers to the enterprise, through negating the need for in-house server hardware and associated management personnel.
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Improved Cost Control
Cloud based IT services enable businesses to control costs and lower their TCO for IT by letting them ‘pick and choose’ the services they need, as and when they need them, rather than tying up large sums of capital procuring and integrating the required technologies. The substantial costs associated with managing, maintaining and upgrading the technology mix are also taken by the service provider.
Server Consolidation
With the emergence of mainstream server virtualisation, large efficiencies in IT spend are to be had through consolidating ageing physical hardware into Virtual Server Infrastructure. Our virtual machines look and behave exactly like dedicated servers but are balanced on top of a powerful cloud computing platform. Our IAAS solution allow users to directly control the amount of processing power and space they use, meaning they never have to pay for hardware they don’t need. Changes to virtual machines can be made dynamically on-the-fly, allowing users to scale resources on-demand.
Business Continuity in the Cloud
Funding IT on-demand via an Opex model not only encourages a more efficient management of IT spend, through services such as Cloud Backup it actually improves a business’s ability to recover from upheaval should the worst happen. IT Services delivered from the Cloud require only low-level processor, RAM, and storage resources when dormant, and deliver quick up-scaling when the business needs it. Having data spread across geographically diverse infrastructure in cloud environments also offers greater agility and mitigates against point of failure risk.
Cloud IS Secure
Storing company data in the Cloud offers numerous efficiency and flexibility advantages over traditional data storage, but many companies are still understandably cautious about their data being stored in and accessed from the Cloud. These fears are gradually receding, with good vendors adhering to strict privacy policies and sophisticated security measures which mean the Cloud can actually be more secure than a typical on-premise setup. Advanced data storage, transmission, and management protocols, including 256-bit AES encryption for stored files, SSL encryption for files in transit, role-based permissions management, and share expiration together provide for the highest degree of security for public and private data. The cost would be lower than for achieving the same levels of security in-house.
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Trends in IT-On-Demand Adoption
- 17.4% rate of growth expected in Software-as-a-Service based applications by 2016 [Gartner]
- 40.7% share of SaaS market held by Office Suite applications. Digital Content Creation 2nd with 32.2%, and Business Intelligence applications 3rd with 27.1% [Gartner]
- 41.7% expected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in IaaS public cloud segment to 2016, of which Compute (43.2%), Storage (36.6%), and Print (16%) [Gartner]
- 15% expected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) to 2016, of which 3 fastest growing segments are Cloud Payments, Industry Operations, and Cloud Advertising. [Gartner]
