Migrating to the cloud has many benefits, and the long-term savings it can bring is one of the most appealing.
And it’s no surprise: Organizations are desperate to leave the financial burdens of hosting solutions on-premises in the past. It brings high, sometimes unpredictable operational costs like capital expenses, startup costs, and the ongoing operational cost of keeping the system running.
However, when you partner with a cloud services provider, they take on many existing costs and responsibilities, from hardware to maintenance. This handoff leads to various cost benefits, allowing organizations to focus on what their business does best while cutting costs.
Let’s look at 9 ways that migrating to the cloud can save you money.
9 Ways the Cloud Can Save You Money
1. Reduce and Fully Utilize Your Hardware
Instead of buying in-house equipment, your cloud services provider takes on these costs and offers the infrastructure to your business as a service. They then offer you the necessary resources to run your cloud solution. As a result, you enjoy lower installation, hardware, maintenance, upgrades, and tech support costs. This benefit is especially valuable to rapidly growing organizations, as new on-premises hardware can be expensive, inconvenient, and difficult, if not impossible, to scale. When you migrate to the cloud, you can also retire existing hardware that is no longer necessary, saving you space, power, and money.
2. Less Demanding Labor and Maintenance
Organizations using the cloud can save over 15% on average in IT spending, which stems largely from a reduction in maintenance and IT staffing costs. This is because when you migrate, your cloud service provider takes on the continued maintenance and updates that allow your system to perform optimally. As a result, you can reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which includes reductions in operational expenses like:
- Overtime, as your IT team will no longer be strained with too many demands and too little time.
- Maintenance, since routine care, repairs, and upgrades will be the responsibility of your provider and won’t cost your company any extra money or time.
- Staffing, which can be reduced in size, or redirected to focus on important initiatives and development that they previously lacked time to do.
- Security, which is significantly stronger than traditional IT systems.
- Downtime expenses. For example, the Hyland Cloud has a 99.9% uptime track record.
Due to these savings, cloud users can funnel a greater percentage of their IT budget into speed, agility, and scalability. And since cloud service providers are constantly improving their technology and services, you’ll enjoy these advancements without extra charge.
3. Flexibility and Mobility
The cloud gives users access to the business data and applications they need from any location at any time. Since the data lives virtually in the cloud, you don’t need to invest in purchasing and managing physical devices or networks. It also offers a mobile option, so users can be productive on the go using the devices they already own, like tablets and phones. The cloud also makes remote work easier because employees don’t need to be within the network.
4. Higher Productivity
Since the cloud’s flexibility and mobility give employees access to data 24/7 from any device, productivity flourishes. According to a recent Forrester study, organizations that moved to the cloud saved $2.8M through increased end-user productivity alone. But developers can enjoy better productivity, too. The same study found that these organizations saved $477.8k through improved scalability, further enhancing developer productivity.
5. Customizable Payment Model
Most cloud services providers use a pay-as-you-go model, allowing for greater customization depending on your company’s needs. You’ll be charged based on what you use, including the amount of storage, virtual server hours, or email boxes. This way, you can keep costs low by eliminating unused resources and delaying purchases that aren’t urgent. Monitoring usage rates is important to avoid letting an unused resource fly under the radar, which can add up and push you over budget. It also allows you to test programs and solutions without committing to them first.
6. Software Savings
When you live in the cloud, you can buy applications via the Web, which are much easier to install. No more waiting weeks or months for a company-wide installation to complete. Instead, cloud software deployment can wrap in a matter of hours so that employees can get back to work sooner. These types of installations also save you money by cutting out upfront licensing costs and the price of additional upgrades. Instead, you can enjoy per-user costs and automatic upgrades. Hosting in the cloud also means that when you implement a software service that doesn’t end up working how you want, you can easily cancel the service and find a new one.
7. Decreased Power, Space, and Environmental Footprint
The cloud has better hardware utilization, which eliminates the need for excessive power. You can easily consolidate servers when you move to the cloud, which saves you power and space. As a result, you can save money on electricity and office real estate and even create a smaller environmental footprint as an organization.
8. Scalability
The cloud is highly scalable, which promotes your organization’s growth while allowing you to protect your budget. Your organization can easily increase or decrease cloud usage as your needs change. This way, you can scale down your resources strategically if you’re close to going over budget. And you can get the resources you need quickly and easily, so your business can run optimally without delays.
9. Lower Initial Capital Investment
When you migrate to the cloud, the capital investments of power, software, servers, and more become the cloud provider’s responsibility. Due to this gain and the cloud’s customizable pay-as-you-go model, you will see a drastic decrease in capital costs. The Forrester study found that the organizations that moved to the Hyland Cloud avoided over $500k in capital expenditure costs within three years. They no longer had to buy additional servers for storage space, and server maintenance became more cost-effective. And since they could rely on their cloud solution, the Hyland Cloud, for their content and process management needs, they could let go of aging or ad hoc solutions that were previously powering their content services. A Director of Operations and Process Improvement who participated in the study had this to say:
“We estimated that, from an internal perspective, it was going to cost us roughly half a million dollars a year to manage servers and maintain support for servers in-house. By switching to the Hyland Cloud, Hyland is maintaining the cost to keep those servers current, to keep them active, and to support that redundant copy of those servers. Our estimated savings totaled about a half million dollars.” -Director of Operations and Process Improvement, Financial Services Organization.
Get More for Less with the Cloud
Cloud migrations are an investment, but their many benefits make them well worth the time, money, and effort. Not only will you see impressive savings in just a few years, but you’ll enjoy more productivity, scalability, expertise, and proven security gains.
Everything You Need to Know About Hyland's Cloud Platform
30-Minute Webinar
Wondering how the Hyland Cloud can help your organization better support your users and meet stringent security, disaster recovery, business continuity, and compliance needs?
Want More Content Like This?
Subscribe to the Naviant Blog. Each Thursday, we’ll send you a recap of our latest info-packed blog so you can be among the first to access the latest trends and expert tips on workflow, intelligent automation, the cloud, and more.
