Your IT guy is lying to you. There. I said it. The truth is – the cloud is not bad for your business. The cloud is bad for him. Email, servers, web sites, even databases can all be put in the cloud and require little to no maintenance. And it can be done for with significant savings over your existing on premise solutions. And it comes with better service. Does your IT guy offer a 99.9% uptime garuntee?
The cloud puts your IT guy out of a job and he knows it. Oh sure, he could study and work hard and drive innovative solutions to improve your competitness. But that is really hard and most IT Pros aren’t going to do that. Instead they lie and insist that on premise is better and more secure. For most small businesses nothing could be further from the truth.
Let me prove my point:
Lets look at a basic office setup: Email, document management, calendars, project management and collaboration.
Microsoft Office 365 for small business
- Exchange for email and calendars
- Sharepoint for document management and project management
- Lync for collaboration
- $5.00 per month per user
- 99% uptime garuntee
- disater recovery
- 25 employees annual cost $1,500
Microsoft Small Business
- Servers Hardware
- Exchange Licensing
- Windows Server Licensing
- Sharepoint Licensing
- SQL Server Licencing
- Server Administrator
- no uptime garuntee
- limited disaster reovery
- 25 employees total cost is a lot more than the cloud!
Did you notice one very large cost is missing from the cloud costs – yep server administrators. That just got outsourced to Microsoft.
Not the worst of it
The financial cost is not the worst costs. The worst costs come from decreased competiveness. With on premise solutions you have to keep the hardware and software for 3 – 5 years to justify the return on investment. 3 – 5 years is a prision sentance.
Think about the business climate five years ago? Did you need a mobile app? Smart phones and tablets were not mainstream in 2008. But they are today. With a cloud solution you pay as you go. No long term ROI. You pay for what your business needs. Period.
The other critical disadvantage is flexabiltiy. If your business doubled or even tripled next year could your existing technology inventment support that? At the very least you would need more licensing and possibly more hardware. The cloud is made to scale. And you can pay as you go.
What next?
You need experts. Hire some talented folks to come in and do an analysis of your business. Ask them deliverer an ROI for moving to the cloud. For most businesses this will be a very simple decision.
As for your IT guy. You will still need him – but in new ways. He doesn’t need to do upgrades or security patches or maintenance any more. But what he needs to be doing is becoming an expert on the cloud and applying the technology to solve business problems. And that is a very valuable person to have on your team.
milliken 