Deon Scheepers, Regional Business Development Manager at Interactive Intelligence Africa, says moving a business to the cloud serves to make it more efficient, but warns over concealed costs.
The worldwide recession has forced many companies to reassess their operations and examine where they can be more efficient without reducing productivity.
Scheepers said: “Moving to the cloud can create significant efficiency savings for companies but only if they are aware of all the concealed costs. The most important piece of advice for anyone looking to move to the cloud is to research.”
He explains that one of the first areas that businesses need to examine before moving into the cloud is how much of the IT infrastructure they should actually transfer. The safest option, for large businesses with sizeable IT budgets, is to create a private cloud by purchasing and installing an infrastructure on the premises, according to Scheepers.
Most businesses cannot afford the private cloud model, however, given its initial cost and ongoing maintenance costs. For these businesses the most cost effective option is a hosted hybrid cloud model that offers the best of both public and private cloud networks.
Scheepers explains a hybrid model as “infrastructure operated by the vendor is deployed on a company’s local network with voice and data kept on the premises ensuring continued access and security, while the logic and routing is in the public cloud and offers the public cloud price model.”
