How my Small Business is Saving $452 by Moving to Cloud
Being a professional Blogger, we have the flexibility to work virtually anywhere. All these years, never felt like having our own office, maybe because I was worried of spending on initial setup and infrastructure. Fortunately, with the advent of Cloud, we work from a small office while leaving the infrastructure worries to cloud.
Being a newly formed enterprise, cash flow is tight initially so we had to find ways of saving a dollar wherever possible.Quick search on cloud computing services for business revealed shocking benefits that small businesses can avail by opting Cloud. If you don’t know what exactly this mean, let me tell you.
Technology is moving up and settling in cloud.
Before Internet came in, we purchased physical hardware infrastructure with software licenses in form of CD. However in Cloud Computing model, everything runs on provider’s server. We just have to purchase subscription and access using web browser. So, you aren’t installing anything on own system but just renting those services. Simple example would be utility service like electricity in which we do not own a power-plant and generate on our own. We subscribe and run our appliances on it and then pay according to use.
Benefit of Cloud services:
- We do not need to install anything on our systems so, no worries of storage and high end infrastructure. Our server mania fever has finally been cured, we are very happy and excited with these new developments.
- Can be accessed anywhere from any device irrespective of Operating system. All you need is a web browser.
- Easy to collaborate and share with colleagues.
- Comparatively cheaper and sometimes free.
- Pay only for what you use.
Cloud can be used as platform to deploy our apps to get it up and running. It can also be as a service where we rent a software.
For example: We need Office suite namely Excel for maintaining expense and work sheets and using excel sometimes is difficult that’s why I use http://www.acuitytraining.co.uk/white-paper/the-seos-guide-to-excel, PowerPoint for client presentations and Word for PDF reading and making. This could cost $219 if we went for Microsoft Office suite for business. Instead, we preferred Office Online which is a cloud service allowing us to access office suite online for free of charge, it is i important to get in touch with a Local SEO Expert that way you can improve your online business.
For storage purposes, we could have used an external Hard Disk which costs around $98. Instead, we preferred to have cloud storage (OneDrive in our case) which offers 15GB of free space. This takes care of documents and images related to work. Even the routine backup of this site is taken on cloud with no offline backup whatsoever.
These were just some of the many examples. Sophisticated solution using Cloud services by Amazon Web Services and Rackspace are available for enterprises with complicated and custom requirements.
By opting cloud, you make IT maintenance someone else’s problem. According to requirements, if there are any upgrades or downgrades required, it can be made with one click. You also save on technical department responsible for handling these. For us, a part time employee handling these stuff could cost $135.
And we did it all for $0.00, yup.
This is how it sums up to $452 of savings in a year.
That was all about Enterprise level. Let us see this from a personal user point of view and how can we benefit using Cloud services.
Storage: We keep on accumulating data and then worry about how to store it. Most of us opt for an external Hard Disk of 1 terabyte or more space for storage. You may combine cloud storage services and get more than 200 GB space online for free.
Office Suite: This is probably most essential requirement of any home user. Instead of Office professional subscription why not go completely online or opt for hybrid cloud like Office 365 subscription which is way cheaper.
There are many possibilities and applications, check out webware sections for more and use accordingly.
