There are many facets to cloud: public, private, hybrid, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and more. The many technical options means there’s a way to make cloud technology work for nearly every business. It’s great news, then, that cloud is also good for corporate IT spending.
Financial Benefits of Cloud
The financial benefits of cloud come in several different ways:
1. Pay for what you use.
Cloud is a pay-as-you-go service. It’s also highly agile and scalable. These factors mean companies don’t need to purchase spare capacity or high-powered machines to support anticipated growth; they can use servers and storage that match their current needs and scale up as new demand materializes. If there’s a downturn, there aren’t sunk costs invested in unused equipment; businesses can just as easily shift to smaller instances that still support the demand. In addition to matching scale to demand, some fault-tolerant workloads can benefit from low-cost preemptible virtual machines on Google Cloud Platform.
2. Reduce disaster recovery costs.
Cloud doesn’t eliminate the need for disaster recovery planning, but it does eliminate the need to provision a standby data center filled with equipment that’s idle except during an annual disaster recovery test. Cloud comes with high-availability and redundancy built in, and a disaster recovery capability in the cloud has low cost unless it’s actively supporting processing during a disaster.
3. Reduce energy and rents.
The costs of IT equipment aren’t only in the computers, storage, and networking devices. The devices are power hungry, consuming vast amounts of electricity. They also take up physical space. With cloud, those requirements, and those costs, are eliminated.
4. More flexible money management.
Cloud transforms hardware purchases, which require large upfront capital expenditures, into smaller, ongoing operational expenses. This shift in how IT uses its money provides additional flexibility for managing corporate funds. In addition, cloud providers offer several purchasing options. On Google Cloud Platform, you can choose to pay as you go or commit to a level of usage in order to receive discounted rates.
5. More efficient technology team.
Because the cloud provider’s staff handles much of the routine maintenance, you can redeploy your IT team to work on other projects. You can get more IT work done without expanding your in-house IT staff.
VAST IT Services supports Google Cloud Platform, ensuring clients have a robust cloud architecture that’s matched to their IT needs. Our VAST View technology enables comprehensive monitoring of cloud operations as well as cloud cost optimization. Contact us to learn more about how VAST IT Services cloud support can help your business enjoy the financial and technical benefits of using cloud.
