Everyone’s talking about the cloud nowadays so you’ve got to consider it, right? This could be a great new thing for your company! You’ve been told that the cloud enables companies like yours to be more flexible and save on their IT costs. It allows free and easy access to data for employees from wherever they are, using whatever devices they want to use.
So it’s time to chuck that old piece of junk and take your company to the cloud, right? Well…just hold on!
There’s no question that if you’re a startup or a very small company or a company that is virtual or whose employees are distributed around the world, a cloud-based environment might be the way to go. Or maybe you’ve got high internal IT costs or require more computing power. But maybe that’s not you.
Maybe your company sells medical supplies, provides exterminating services, manufactures wholesale items or practices medicine or law. You know you represent the very core of small business in America. We know this too. You are just like one of Hooks Systems’ many small business clients. And what are these companies doing when it comes time to replace their servers?
These very smart owners and managers of small and medium sized businesses who have existing applications running on old servers are not all rushing to the cloud. Instead, they’ve been buying new servers.Wait, buying new servers? What about the cloud?
When we evaluated cloud based hosting services from Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace, and after bad experiences with cloud based IT management firms who promised to move their existing applications (Office, accounting, CRM, databases) to their servers and manage them offsite, all of these services came in at about the same price: approximately $50 per month per user. This is what it costs for an existing company to move their existing infrastructure to a cloud based infrastructure in 2018.
Suppose you have maybe 20 people in your company who need computer access. Suppose you are satisfied with your existing applications and don’t want to go through the agony and enormous expense of migrating to a new cloud based application. Suppose you don’t employ a full time IT guy, but have a service contract with a reliable local IT firm.
Now do the numbers: $50 per month x 20 users is $1,000 per month or $12,000 PER YEAR for an all-cloud-based service. How many servers can you buy for that amount? For all of our clients the decision was a no-brainer: they all bought new servers and had us install them while putting some of their applications like email, calendar, data backup & storage in the cloud. This is called a Hybrid Network and makes sense for most small businesses. Applications such as Microsoft Office 365 ($5-12.50/user/mo.) allows our clients to have their email, calendars and storage in the Microsoft Cloud while keeping their financials and other restricted files in-house on their server at a combined cost that is substantially lower than a cloud only solution..
