Managing Your Cloud Costs

Cloud computing has taken the business world by storm. It wasn’t so long ago that businesses had to pay in-house technicians good money to design, research, and purchase all the hardware needed to run an onsite server. This is an expensive endeavor, and for a small business may not always be at the top of a list of priorities. Today, cloud computing can solve that problem (and many more), but if you don’t closely manage your cloud costs, it can end up wasting capital. Today, we will look at cloud computing’s tendency for organizations to go overboard on their cloud offerings.

What Can You Use the Cloud For?

Do you need communications tools? Check. Hosted-VoIP and email.
Do you need processing power? Check. Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service.
Do you need applications and storage? Check. Software as a Service and hosted Storage.

The truth is that anything you can do with onsite hardware, you can accomplish with cloud resources that are billed per user, per month; or, per gigabyte.

In the cloud, you can quickly deliver your business functionality, redundancy, and everything else that it needs to be effective. It works great for full-time, part-time, and temporary workers, alike; and, can be leveraged quickly, with only short setup processes before it is a viable, and mostly secure tool.

What Are the Drawbacks?

The drawbacks of cloud computing, especially in environments that are hosted by an outside service provider, are typically caught up in the lack of control your organization has over the hardware itself. Businesses can choose to create onsite “private” cloud systems that return the large capital costs to the company, but provide controls and management over their hardware systems as well as the accessibility needed to remotely access the system, among the other superlative aspects that cloud access brings to an organization's IT.

One of the major drawbacks is, ironically, cost. Since the IT infrastructure used to run the solutions is housed and managed by the service provider, they price solutions accordingly. If your organization needs 30 cloud licenses, the solution could get costly quick. What’s worse, if you have people leave your employ, and you don’t reactively cancel the cloud solution before your monthly license is up, you will be on the hook for the cost of the monthly fee.

If this doesn’t seem like a costly scenario, think about the times when you assemble teams that work on projects. These projects require three or four cloud-based applications and other resources. If each member of a project team is costing the business hundreds of dollars a month in software, a month or two paying for solutions for a large team that has all but wrapped up its project just decimates the ROI of the project.

In order to ensure that you aren’t paying for cloud-based resources that you don’t need to pay for, having a strategy in place to manage all of your organization’s cloud-based resources is important. At BNMC, we have a tried-and-true system to ensure that your cloud resources are managed and that you aren’t paying for more than you need to. Call us today at (978) 482-2020 for more information.