hidef

As a buzz word, cloud computing has been around for quite a while now. If you haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet you may have a lot of questions about what this concept means to your organization. Will it help you to be more efficient in your mission, or will it add an extra layer of complexity to a part of your business you already don’t completely understand? As a nonprofit, there are a lot of reasons that transitioning your IT infrastructure to the cloud can make a lot of sense. Like anything, though, to be successful it takes careful planning and plenty of research. Because of this, I want to cover what I think are the 5 best reasons that cloud computing can make sense to your organization.

1. It's Cheaper Right Out of the Gate

One of the core tenets of cloud computing is based around the fact that it helps you pay only for what you use. If your needs change, either rapidly or slowly, you can easily change your infrastructure to meet those needs. Ultimately, you’re not paying top dollar for hardware that is sitting largely unused making each IT dollar you spend more efficient.

Simplifying your billing is incredibly easy in the cloud. There are no additional vendors to negotiate with to purchase new hardware, or to wait around for to setup and configure that hardware. On top of that, the whole bill for your infrastructure generally comes from one vendor. When you embrace cloud computing you save yourself the time, hassle, and money dealing with the run-around of traditional hosting environments.

2. Your people have better things to do

Spend less time managing your IT infrastructure! The key to a successful IT strategy is automation. When you move your infrastructure to the cloud with the right strategy, you gain the benefit of automated deployments, automated scalability, and even automated backups. Don’t hire a team of IT specialists to attend to the constant care and feeding of your hardware, those resources can be better utilized within the mission of your organization!

3. You can afford it

One of my favorite parts of cloud computing is that the most modern technologies are available to even the smallest organizations. If faster machines become available there are no expensive migration plans with an IT team on standby. If you need a large amount of high-speed storage space (upwards of a terabyte) in a moment’s notice to work on some large dataset you found, press a button. If you want to make sure you’re completely protected in the case of a disaster, send a copy of your data to another physical location with the push of a button. All of this is typical in the large enterprise sector, but not for your 15-person nonprofit. That is, until cloud computing came along.

Just take a look at these annual estimated costs for a small- to medium-sized nonprofit:

• Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2): $5,857
• Co-location of servers: $15,992
• Onsite hosting of servers: $110,112

4. Your users deserve the best experience

Provide the best experience for your users on the budget you already have. With the infrastructure available in the cloud you can provide a consistently fast experience with less downtime and less stress. Without additional work or planning, building your infrastructure in the cloud means that you get to reap the benefits of the extensive automatic redundancy and connectivity. This built-in redundancy and connectivity ensures your users are never turned away and that you get to focus on what you do best.

5. Your IT infrastructure will grow as your organization does

Organizations everywhere are being forced to be smarter about all the decisions they make in their day-to-day operations. Being smart is utilizing a service that grows like your organization does. You can start out small and grow into your needs, if you need to. Maybe your needs fluctuate, and you have to be able to support 10,000 users during the Fall and scale that back to 100 users the following Spring. Your infrastructure needs to be smarter and work for you, not against you.

Let us help guide you down the right path to realize the benefits of moving your infrastructure to the cloud. We’ve been there and done that before, and we’ll make sure your initiative is a complete success.