How can you reduce operating costs but still achieve as much?

Many businesses have addressed emerging trends through actions to drive cost reduction and leverage IT adoption of cloud-style services.

The challenges and issues are in the transition from the current traditional IT to the new potential capabilities of cloud computing..

Return on Investment (ROI) is perhaps the most widely used measure of financial success in business. If you have a proposal to use cloud computing in place of in-house IT, this is how you and others will want to assess it.

How do you do this? What are the qualities of cloud computing that affect ROI?

ROI is the proportionate increase in the value of an investment over a period of time. It can be measured in a variety of different ways, but there are just four basic ways to improve it: decrease the investment, increase revenue, decrease costs, and make the return faster.

Using cloud computing, you can achieve any of these; but you cannot achieve them all at the same time. It is the relationship between the factors that counts, rather than the absolute values. If you move to public cloud, you generally decrease investment but increase cost. With private cloud, it is the other way round. You can alter  ROI either way, depending on your revenue and speed of return. Revenue can be increased by improving the delivered features and quality – which enable a higher price to be charged – or by operating on a larger scale. But improvements in features, quality, and scale generally also mean higher costs. You must get the balance right.

Just looking at cloud computing from a technical infrastructure point of view is potentially missing the wider picture of the impact of technology on the business. Overall, what matters is defining the value to business. Value can be defined in many ways. It does not just mean the financial values, but can also mean customer value, seller value, broker value, market brand value, and corporate value.

Running voice, videoconferencing and video surveillance across the network that also handles email, file transfers and critical business transactions is enabling organisations to reduce overall capital expenditures and improve their agility. Excell have done this and  would be happy to help you with the analysis on this journey.

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