Everything has a lifespan and whether your servers are in a data centre or on premise, they start aging from the moment you install them. Depending on how you plan for this, you can see spikes in cash flow during these times of swapping hardware. The costs come in the form of the new servers themselves, human work hours and writing off the lost value of the old servers through depreciation. The human work hours can be further broken down into the hourly value in dollars of project management and sheer time on task as well as the time that your IT team could be doing something else.
The question you need to ask yourself is: Do I want to perpetuate this cycle?
There is a better way! Cloud hosted virtual servers don't expire or depreciate and can provide real time, seamless transition when needed. After all, they are software servers that reside on physical servers and are therefore agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. Check out my previous post on introducing the cloud for people who aren't necessarily technical if you would like to know more.
In fact, the dedicated teams that manage the cloud's physical servers handle everything below your virtual servers for you and at a cheaper price point. The virtual nature of cloud servers also relieve your IT team of many work hours both in hours saved during transition but also in the flexibility of modifying servers. Need more memory, hard drive space, CPU power or even a duplicate server? Click a few buttons and you've got it!
Cloud infrastructure can even automatically scale up and down as usage changes. Cloud providers offer a pay per use pricing model which allows you to only pay for what to need.
There are many benefits to the cloud but the ones that will appeal most to a business are the cost benefits over time, enterprise grade security and flexibility. For a full list of benefits of the cloud, have a look here.
Planning for the future is always best done with all the information at hand. There is help to lean on.
TMH Solutions is a cloud solutions company that specializes in Managed Applications, Managed Services, Cloud Enablement, Data Management and Reporting. We would love to discuss your company's vision and help make it future ready! Please reach out to us at sales@tmhsolutions.ca.