In business, many organisational decisions often come down to a cost-benefit analysis – if I spend this much, how much will my organization benefit? And in today’s economy, businesses have to make tough decisions regarding particular investments as they can’t always guarantee a good enough return.
But this is where the utilization of cloud computing can help to boost your return on investment. By migrating your activity to the cloud, you can take advantages of lower costs, more efficient resource use and scalability to increase your return on investment, for example, in building a new application.
Lower Costs
One way in which cloud computing helps to increase your ROI is through decreasing a number of your costs, including capital and operational costs.
With cloud computing, you no longer have to purchase servers for use in-house, resulting in lower data centre costs that help to boost your return on investment. So rather than purchasing huge servers that take up space and take quite a while for the IT department to configure, you can enjoy provisioning servers for a low cost based on the economies of scale that cloud providers are able to achieve.
Another cost saving benefit that contributes to higher ROI when provisioning servers from cloud providers is that you avoid maintenance costs that you would otherwise have to pay with in-house servers. So instead of paying energy bills and security staff to maintain the cloud data centre, cloud service providers take on these costs.
Building apps in the cloud
As part of the service of provisioning cloud servers, you can also check to see how many CPU’s are currently in use to support a particular application, how much this costs and if you are making use of these resources efficiently.
But what you often find with cloud computing is that projects can be brought to market at a much faster pace compared to when using in-house servers. So projects that used to take 4, maybe 5 months to complete, now take less than a month in the cloud.
And the more applications that you build in the cloud in a shorter space of time, the more your return on investment increases as you make more efficient use of resources.
But there are a few considerations you need to make, such as thinking about the type of applications you’re building in the cloud. Not all applications can operate at their best in the cloud, and to do so often requires optimization of servers, which can cost money and time.
So you need to consider whether it’s worth moving all applications to the cloud, or moving the ones that are more compatible with the cloud, in order to maximise ROI.
Scalability
One of the greatest advantages of cloud computing is the ability to rapidly scale your cloud servers up or down based on assessments of how much computing capacity you really need.
Provisioning servers from cloud providers is easy and quick, meaning you don’t lose time in application development and can ensure a quick time to market for your product.
And through a pay as you go model, the scalability of cloud servers means that you only pay for what you use. So where you have periods of low activity, you can scale down your server provisioning compared to times of high activity such as new builds – only paying for what you use.
Ultimately, scalability helps to boost your time to market without incurring extra costs, helping to increase your return on investment.
With cloud computing, organizations are able to alter their business model to increase efficient use of technology that translates into a higher return on investment. This includes lowering costs through provisioning servers off site, building applications efficiently in the cloud and making use of scalability to only pay for the computing capacity you use.
And today, there are a range of cloud computing management tools that help to boost the efficiency with with you operate in the cloud.
For example, Cloud Machine Manager (CMM) is a cloud management tool that gives you on-demand control of when your servers are turned on or off. Using CMM you can ensure that your servers are switched off when they’re not use, saving you a whole heap of cash as well as ensuring that you’re using your resources efficiently. And with all the money that you save, you can reinvest in a bigger and better server, earning yourself a free upgrade.
See how much you can save with our savings estimator.
