5 Unusual Ways the Cloud Will Save Your Business Money

Interesting facts about how the cloud will benefit your business that I found while looking up other things.

1. Rent: “In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.” – Simon Hoggart, English journalist and broadcaster.

As any company doing business in a metropolitan city will tell you, office space rent is often a major expense. Although the numbers will vary widely, consider that a company based out of New York has an in-house data center that occupies 1000 square feet. This assumption is reasonable for a small data center serving 100 employees, including servers, cooling units, etc.

This company ends up spending $115,000 on rent for the data center alone. By embracing cloud computing, this money can be saved. Even if cost of subscribing to a cloud-based service is factored in, the savings will still be considerable. For larger companies, they add up to substantial amounts; for smaller ones, every dollar saved is treasured.

2. Computers and Laptops: using the Cloud could bring your hardware costs to…..$0. The trend today is BOYD (bring your own device). Employees are using their own devices in the workplace, some are even purchasing their own apps to use at work. The cloud eliminates your servers and the fact that cloud apps work on any browser, PC and MACs, upgrading older computers simply becomes unnecessary.

3. Phones: Web-based phone services have been a savior for many start-ups who need to conserve capital but compete with larger companies. Web-based phone systems such as Ring Central and Five 9 provide 800 numbers, multiple extensions, and even personal voice messages for a minimal monthly fee. And, as these systems are cloud-based, all this is accessible on your smartphone.

4. New-found Employee Hours: If time is money, then every hour your team wastes on IT headaches increases already stretched overhead and take them away from productive work. According to a recent Samsung study that examines how workers are actually using IT in the workplace, employees spend an average of 7 hours a week fixing IT headaches. Take that number, multiply it by your hourly cost per employee, then multiply that figure by the number of employees….and you have a staggering figure.

5. Happiness: There isn’t a quantitative figure that an employer can put on employee happiness but there is a definite correlation between employee happiness and profitability. Allowing your employees to deal with the daily familial demands and giving them the flexibility to stay in touch with the office or work from home late into the night actually improves your bottom line. Companies recognized as the “best places to work” (by Fortune, Great Places to Work, Working Mother, and other raters) have better financial results than their counterparts in the broad market indexes such as the S&P 100 and S&P 500.

Using cloud-based apps allows your employee to see their daughter score the winning goal, reduce IT costs, save on rent and square footage, replacing your expensive phone system with a monthly fee produces a better work place, improves the bottom line and reduces IT headaches.

To paraphrase the iconic MasterCard commercial, using the Cloud is priceless.