Tip of the Week: Is Your Cloud Solution Worth the Money? Here are 5 Ways to Find Out

Businesses adopt cloud computing with the intention of cashing in on its many benefits, like doing more for less. Although, how does a business owner know for certain that their cloud investment is actually paying off? Here are five ways to find out.

Compare Costs
If you’ve made the switch from hosting your data in-house to hosting it in the cloud, then putting numbers to your cost savings can be achieved by comparing your IT expenses before and after you’ve migrated. Depending on what financial software your accounting department uses, finding this information out can be as easy as comparing expense reports and spreadsheets. You should also keep in mind that if you’ve recently switched to the cloud, then comparing expenses may not yet be an accurate exercise.

User Satisfaction
When it comes down to it, users determine the true value of a technology. Therefore, you’ll find it worth your time to conduct employee satisfaction surveys. By giving users a forum to voice their concerns, you may find ways to improve your cloud solution and make it even more valuable. For example, if employees like using the cloud but they’re frustrated with downtime they may experience due to a poor Internet connection, then you’ll know to resolve the issue.

IT Responsiveness
One reason why businesses migrate to the cloud is to minimize the need of having an in-house IT team resolve issues. An additional factor to consider is how long it takes for these problems to be resolved. For example, if your cloud provider takes longer to fix an issue than your previous arrangement for IT maintenance, then you may want to reconsider your processes. Keep in mind that by switching to the cloud, you should see a reduction in the average time between bug report and solution deployment. On average, companies that migrate to the cloud see this key metric reduced anywhere from 30-to-80 percent.

Business Continuity
It’s easy to overlook the value of your data being secure and accessible today, tomorrow, and the next day. Although, if you consider that a business that loses its data due to a disaster typically goes out of business within a year, then it’s easy to see what makes hosting and storing your company’s data in the cloud so valuable. Simply put, if a business experiences a server failure, security breach, or problem due to human error, and they’ve deployed a cloud-based data security solution, then they can be confident that operations will continue with minimum downtime. The continuance of operations KPI is one of the most unsung heroes of cloud benefits.

Other Valuable Benefits to Keep in Mind
While it’s certainly important to compare expense reports and look at hard numbers, you’ll also want to consider ways that cloud computing saves you time and money that aren’t so black and white. This requires you to look beyond spreadsheets and find ways to measure factors like, not having to pay on-site repair jobs, improved collaboration with your various departments, just how your staff accessing the cloud from anywhere benefits operations, etc.

Ultimately, the value of your company’s solutions is determined by how well your needs are being met. To that end, give Suffolk Computer Consultants a call at 631-905-9617 and we’ll determine the best ways that technology can work for you!