A lot of people have recently asked me how moving their IT Infrastructure to the cloud will save them money. Every company is different. However, particularly where SMEs are concerned, there are some key areas where cost savings are consistently made.
Capital Expenditure
For SMEs, capital isn’t always easy to find. Setting up a robust, well designed, highly available, redundant environment is an expensive and difficult project.
Our cloud infrastructure is already pre-built. This means you don’t need to spend lots of money to buy and install expensive servers, SANs, networking equipment and hypervisors. You also don’t need to spend big fees leasing rack space in data centres.
Not only that, but renting cloud infrastructure makes it easier to account for the depreciation of hardware in the books. Less hardware, less headaches.
This provides an incredible edge to small and medium enterprises that have small capital to start with. Instead of worrying about setting up their infrastructure, they can spend their money on people and systems instead.
Real Estate and Energy Costs
For Businesses that have their server infrastructure onsite at their office, this incurs considerable costs. Such costs include a secure server room, large enough to host the racks of servers, with adequate air conditioning to keep the room cool.
Servers consume a lot of electricity. Cloud providers such as Bang IT Solutions dynamically provision virtual computers so they consume less energy and produce less heat than a traditional data centre/server room. So this is also good for the environment and will keep Al Gore from knocking on your door.
Businesses who rent rack space in a data center will already know that there is nowhere else on earth more expensive to rent per square meter. In Sydney, $1million will buy you about 41 square meters of luxury property. In a Sydney data centre, $1 million will get you a similar amount of square meters for 1 year.
Scalable Infrastructure and P.A.Y.G. Payment Model
The main advantage is that you only pay for the services you use. Most Businesses buy server hardware which will provide enough compute to allow for growth (usually over optimistic), over a period of 5 years, and also allow for high availability in case of node failure.
With an IaaS platform like Bang IT Solutions, as the need for computing capacity arises, you can easily provision and deploy resources in under 5 minutes and only pay for what you consume.
Lower Staff Costs
Let’s be honest, infrastructure guys don’t come cheap. The storage guy, the network guy, the server guy – these are all required to keep your infrastructure ticking over. Few things are more time-consuming than having to maintain your own data center or server room.
When hardware breaks, your IT team need to spend often hours on the phone to the hardware vendor trying to explain that a disk in the server has died. Vendors won’t accept this until the server has been cold booted (out of hours), and a backup of the logs has been sent to them for analysis. This might sound extreme but it happens. A lot. When your infrastructure is hosted with an IaaS provider such as Bang IT Solutions, this won’t need to happen again.
When servers become EOL, it’s a time consuming process installing the new hardware, testing it, and then migrating the existing VMs across. The old hardware then has to be decommissioned. This no longer has to be part of the job description of an Infrastructure guy. They can spend their time experimenting on other solutions which will make your company money.
If you haven’t already considered the cloud as a viable alternative to hosting your own hardware, then now is the time to do so. Speak to an expert today to discuss your options by emailing cloudinfo@bangitsolutions.com or call us on 1300 770 035.