Cloud computing brings immediate changes. For BiS-Henderson Chief Operating Officer Mark Botham, moving the company’s computing to the cloud was worth a member of staff.
“It gave me back one member of staff immediately – someone who was spending their life looking after our IT – and now I’m using them much more productively within the company,” Mark told journalists in a companion supplement published with The Guardian.
The simple fact is that communications technology has caught up with corporate computing and what once needed processing power on a desktop can be supplied remotely over a bigger network. Working across two sites, one in Northampton, the other near Heathrow, BiS-Henderson had outgrown its in-house servers: the cloud can deliver files anywhere in the world.
“We figured we could either spend £30,000 or £35,000 reproducing what we currently had, or we could make a move to the cloud,” observed Mark. The attraction of being able to identify exactly how much IT was really going to cost on a monthly basis, per workplace, was a strong incentive in making the choice.
He chose to work with Moongroup, which supplies a flexible public cloud in partnership with cloud provider Rise. BiS-Henderson is now operating its payroll and accounts on the cloud, along with the lion’s share of its computing needs.
For the supply chain specialist, the arrival of cloud computing means that core business functions can be outsourced securely on the latest server technology. A significant bonus is that all the software versions are in synch.
Anyone who remembers how cavernous a new 20MB hard drive used to feel 20 years ago will also know that storage always fills up faster than it was ever expected to. The duplication of code and data files across the machines in a local network also pushes up storage requirements.
The prevalence of keeping local copies of specific key files demonstrates that the library book approach to computing is alive and probably still occupying space on your local network (and possibly USB keys, too…). Having to buy an endless succession of desktop hard drives is a chore that most management people would cheerfully consign to the bin. Mark Botham advises you to “Move to the cloud and make it happen”.
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