Cloud migration, be it on a smaller scale like migrating workflow to G Suite or completely moving the IT infrastructure to cloud like AWS, is now recognized by many enterprises as a key ingredient to improving efficiency and ROI. While almost every business has either fully or partly moved to the cloud, there is persistent confusion about how to quantify the benefits of their migration.
For example, if a business moves its workflow from Microsoft Office 2019 to G Suite, the common approach is to compare the license fee of the former to the latter’s subscription fee. Office 2019 business-edition costs a one-time payment of $249 while G Suite is available for businesses at $12/month. The general concern here is that if you use Office 2019 for more than 20 months, it’s essentially free from subsequent months, making cloud migration more expensive in the long run.
So what are we missing here? A lot, as it turns out!
Cloud migration isn’t just about deploying cheaper solutions to cut costs. The benefits are spread across the board - which must be taken into account if accurate ROI assessment has to be made.
The first and most obvious benefit is that cloud migration enables remote working, which itself has a long list of benefits to offer. A simple back of the napkin calculation reveals that a mid-sized business spends anywhere between $3,000 to $7,000 per employee in office space, utilities, parking, etc. For remote workers, these costs are driven straight down to $0.
The amount of money you can save by opening up your business’s remote working capabilities must be accounted for in your ROI calculation.
The next cost savings area is IT maintenance. If you run on-premise applications, you have to hire an employee to manage the infrastructure and constantly make investments to keep everything running smoothly. Yet, if your workflow migrates to the cloud and employees work remotely, these overheads are also eliminated.
Third and most importantly, is the cost of expansion. On-premise applications like Microsoft Office come with a strict ceiling on the number of users. If you hire even one new employee, you are required to purchase a new license. Consider our earlier example of one time purchase vs. monthly subscription. If you’re growing quickly within a two year period, then you may hit your max number of users more quickly than anticipated and be required to purchase another license. By contrast, a cloud subscription already charges per user, which you can include in your growth calculations.
Finally, data and security are paramount to every organization. Be it theft or loss, no business can afford to compromise its data. Imagine you have Office 2019 installed on your workstations and (as they always eventually do) the system crashes, taking all the data with it. Can you put a price on that lost data?
You can never predict when ‘eventually’ will happen to you. With cloud migration, there are no such risks. Even if your entire office gets blown away by a hurricane, all your data would remain safe and accessible. How much is that security and reassurance worth?
Overall, cloud migration has proved itself to be more efficient and cost-effective for most use cases. Along with quantifiable ROI benefits, it offers a whole range of additional perks like flexibility and security that on-premise applications simply can’t match. To learn more about how cloud migration can benefit your organization in specific use cases, get in touch for a free consultation.
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