Break the IT CAPEX cycle

Moving your IT operations into the cloud can be a great way to improve cashflow thanks to the flexibility of affordable monthly payments. There is no capital expenditure on servers (or all the associated costs) and you’ll just pay for what you need as your business grows or contracts.

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It transforms your IT spend from a significant capital expense to a manageable operational expense.

Sounds great, so where’s the catch?  We don’t think there is one! Here’s why.

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1. You can strike on-premises servers off your balance sheet as depreciating assets and keep hold of your cash (or avoid having to finance servers).
2. In the current business climate, many capital expenditure (CAPEX) budgets have been cut. With the OPEX (operational expenditure) advantage of cloud computing, IT teams no longer have to argue for a slice of this budget.
3. Upgrades to on-premises servers are inevitable after two or three years and bring unavoidable management time and upfront costs alongside hidden surprises. Breaking this IT CAPEX cycle is easy by moving systems into the cloud and making IT an operational, monthly cost. Just upgraded your servers due to the lockdown? You should still consider breaking this cycle as soon as possible.
4. A monthly IT service model is an operational expenditure (OPEX) line item and typically has tax and budgeting advantages compared to large CAPEX. This is the reason why most businesses prefer to lease their car fleets – an all-inclusive monthly fee is easier to manage. Taking IT into the cloud works on the same principle.
5. After the initial migration, also known as digital transformation, there are never any capital costs for servers, you just pay monthly depending on the number of users, so if your workforce reduces, you won’t be paying over the odds.
6. With remote working likely to be the new normal for millions of workers, staff should be dialling in to the latest, most up to date servers from their homes to optimise their efficiency and productivity. On-premises servers will date very quickly and need constant care, while the cloud is a fully managed service that is updated and upgraded all the time.
7. In the modern workplace where your team is working from home and/or spread out in multiple locations, it makes total sense to move away from a traditional on-prem server model to the cloud. Teams are no longer in the same building as the server (and they don’t need to be to work effectively), so why waste the capital investment? You never have any over- (or under-) utilised IT assets in the server room, and you can scale as much as you like.
8. When it comes to business applications such as recruitment or operations software, these can usually be moved from a €œlocked-in€ hosted environment to cloud versions. Staff usually experience better performance after systems move to the cloud. For example Microsoft Azure gives the freedom to manage and deploy applications on a secure global cloud network and has flexible pay-for-what-you-use pricing options.
9. By moving business functions to Office 365, staff can continue to do their day-to-day tasks, and much more, with greater efficiency. The cloud infrastructure provides added security, compliance, device and user management for employers. You also never have to worry about disaster and recovery issues if the worst happens, such as hardware failure or viruses.
10. With a modern workplace concept and people working remotely, new devices and new starters (at home or internationally) can be setup quickly without having to go to the office, streamlining operations.
11. If your businesses grows, there is no need to buy new servers, only to upgrade again in a few short years. The IT infrastructure should be ready to flex very easily and quickly as your business (and the world) adapts to a new way of working. The cloud gives that flexibility without the huge capital and management expense and opens a world of innovative new capabilities for systems and processes.
12. You can say goodbye to constant server management and security patches to ensure reliability. You can just get on with business. Not only does the cloud offer better cybersecurity (particularly for regulated businesses that require standards for both data compliance and information security) than your own on-prem server would, it also provides increased visibility. We can create specific data prevention policies that are designed specifically for your industry sector or organisational requirements.
13. You also save space by eliminating the need for bulky servers, communications rooms and the systems that are required to maintain them. What’s more, you can increase your profitability by converting the newly acquired space into an income driven activity space (or just expand into it to avoid the inevitable costs of a proposed move to larger premises). The use of the space can often be a monthly expense that is already overlooked.
14. What’s more, our Microsoft hosted cloud solutions are 100% carbon neutral.

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Extech Cloud has spent years working on, and refining, the journey to the cloud. To date, we have successfully completed hundreds of cloud transformation projects, saving our customers thousands of pounds, improving their overall performance and making their staff happier as a result.

Could you be next?  Talk to us now for an initial discussion.

Call 01444 443200 or email us at info@extech.co.uk.