Cloud Cost for Small Business
What is Cloud?
Cloud Computing is a method of delivering your applications, data, e-mail and other pieces of your network from a secure off-premise data center. With the advances in technology over the last decade and the speed/ availability of the internet, applications running on servers in a datacenter hundreds of miles away run just as fast as if they were installed on your local desktop. With Cloud, all of the processing happens on the server and multiple devices like PC, tablets and smartphones can access the information. A simple example would be where one copy of Microsoft Office resides in the Cloud, and multiple users could be given access, even though the program does not reside on that users local device.
Many people are already familiar with Cloud Storage, such as iCloud or Dropbox. This is also a secure off-premise datacenter which is dedicated solely to the storage of data which can be accessed by multiple users on any device. In Cloud Storage solutions, there are typically no applications loaded and thus no processing occurs.
What does Cloud Cost?
As with most things in life it depends. You can calculate Cloud Cost based on the number of components & usage, servers, storage needed, processor needed, ram needed, and applications needed; as you can guess the list goes on. Let’s look it from one simple angle of per user based Cloud Cost.
Cloud Cost components:
- Server infrastructure
- Emails solution
- MS-Office (most users need it)
- Sync software to link user BYOD Device data to Cloud Data
- Terminal Server based Cloud seat or Virtual Desktop
- Antivirus
- Spam filtering
- Backup & Disaster Recovery
- Server support and monitoring 24×7
- Workstation support
- Support at client premise
Depending on the components included our experience shows a range of $130 to $240 per user per month. In other words the 10 users Cloud Cost per month could range from $1300 to $2400, depending on exact components needed. In this simple example, the cost eliminated on premise includes: a physical server with warranty and support, local licenses, local antivirus/spam copies, backup, disaster recovery, power and local software updates. Also, since cloud provides rental licenses, Cloud provides the latest updated licenses, without capital costs.
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