Support You Don’t See: The Benefits of Hosted Services

Hosted services are a godsend to businesses that have a lot of IT needs but not much of an IT budget to work with.

Migrating to the cloud will allow you to cut costs, improve efficiency, and more easily meet (or even exceed) your revenue goals.

To illustrate exactly how hosted services/the cloud will benefit your business, we’re going to take a quick ride in our time machine to show you just how bad people had it before cloud computing was a possibility.

[an engine struggles to start, some beeping noises in the background]

Looks like we’re almost ready, folks…

[loud roar as the engine finally turns over, accompanied by a high electric whine]

Here we-

[suddenly, an explosion of light and sound]

November 24^th, 2000

– Go. We’ve turned the dial back about 15 years to the year 2000. The time machine has a radio – now it’s picking up some Destiny’s Child, next up is *NSYNC. Everyone outside is busy quoting De Niro lines from Meet the Parents.

Let’s walk into an ordinary office.

Flipping through the expense reports, you see a lot of IT expenses that most modern businesses, the ones that have outsourced most of their IT support that is, don’t have to deal with.

First of all, to support your equipment, an in-house solution is your only solution. You had no choice but to hire IT workers to handle your infrastructure. And for the expert strategy and long-term planning necessary to really help you grow, you’d have to invest in the C-level salary of a Chief Information Officer (CIO).

Another thing: when a business in this time period grows, it has to invest in installing more servers and other equipment in the office to handle the extra traffic. Not only does this equipment come with high upfront costs, but they also bring the burden of significant ongoing expenses of the extra electricity and maintenance required to keep everything running.

And if the business stop growing all of sudden for some reason, you’re stuck having invested in a bunch of expensive equipment that you don’t even need.

Okay, that’s enough. This is starting to feel like a doctor watching someone use leaches for medicine. The businesspeople of the early 00’s had no idea how much the cloud was going to change their lives…

Let’s go back home.

[the engine roars again, another loud flash]

Snap Back to Present Day

Finally, we can listen to something contemporary, like Beyoncé or Justin Timberlake.

Let’s check out a modern office that relies mostly on hosted services for comparison.

In-house IT employees are no longer necessary. They’re still around, though, with low-level workers in 2014 averaging a $50,000 salary and CIOs averaging $150,000.

Hosted solutions provide their clients with remote access to multiple IT and business experts for consulting purposes at a flat rate that’s much more affordable than the six figure salary of a single CIO. Network security, equipment maintenance, and business continuity/disaster recovery can also be handled remotely at that same flat rate, making in-house, low-level IT workers also obsolete.

Also, remember how expensive it was to upgrade your infrastructure back in 2000? With the cloud you can save a lot of money, and also get more reliable and secure service, by paying for remote access to someone else’s server (that’s how the cloud works, basically) instead of investing in your own. That “someone else” is responsible for all upfront, power, and maintenance costs associated with owning servers, and you get to piggyback off their investment for just a small access fee.

The savings your business will see through hosted services are incredible. It’s a great time to be alive.

Contact us at (613) 828-1384 or info@fuellednetworks.com for more information about our hosted services.