Can you imagine someone from your electricity company calling and asking you to guess how much electricity your business will use over the next 5 years? Based on that guess you’d then be expected to pay for that electricity upfront and in full?

It wouldn’t be very practical would it?

That’s exactly what happens with your business IT. Every five years your IT company will put together a quotation for a new server and guess has much data you will need over the coming years.

Quite often you’ll end up with a server with say 500gb of storage and only ever use 150gb of it. What happens to the rest of the storage? Do you get your money back? No, I’m afraid you don’t. This is called redundant expenditure. You are paying for something that you’ll never use.

Take another example. If your business had 20 members of staff all using a computer on their desks. Each computer would probably have Microsoft Office and an anti-virus program installed. Imagine again if your business suddenly experienced some financial problems and you had to make 10 members of staff redundant. What would happen to all those PCs? Could you send them back to your supplier and get your money back? No, you’d be stuck with them.

Cloud Computing completely eliminates guesswork and wasted computer costs. If you have 150gb worth of data, you pay for 150gb of data. If you have 10 members of staff then, you’ve guessed it, you pay for 10 members of staff.

Photo Credit: mikeshelby