Regardless of cash reserves or investment, every new business needs to keep its running costs as low as possible to free up funds to drive growth. Few new businesses can get by without IT, but capital spend on hardware and software makes a significant dent in the budget.
The issue is compounded as your business grows; more employees require more hardware and software licences. Unfortunately, these investments lose their value over time – PCs slow down, software stops being supported, tools no longer offer the functions you need. The drop in computer performance relates directly to a fall in productivity, hurting your bottom line. This is where Microsoft Cloud technologies can really come into their own.
Using Cloud for the future
Using Cloud technologies your business can build a scalable IT platform that flexes and grows as you do. More importantly still, Cloud systems can be expanded (or shrunk) as your business demands change – so you never pay for software licenses that are not being used for example.
Give me an example
Take Microsoft Office, the ubiquitous productivity suite comprising Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. These tools are vital to many back operations – writing letters, sending email, calculating finances and preparing presentations. But they are also quite costly; every user must have a licence in order to use the software, costing a few hundred pounds per head.
As your business grows, purchasing new licences isn’t a problem. However, should you need to downsize for any reason, you are left with several hundred pounds-worth of assets that sit around and do nothing but become obsolete as updated versions of Office are released.
Choosing Office 365, Microsoft’s Cloud version of their productivity suite, avoids such problems. Licences are bought on a subscription basis, so you only pay for what you use. Should an employee leave, you simply cancel that subscription. Office 365 also helps you avoid the problem of obsolescence (software going out of date) because all upgrades are included (and applied) automatically as part of your subscription.
In which case, starting with Cloud systems is ideal for new businesses looking to get the maximum from their early investments.
To learn more about Office 365 and other Microsoft Cloud technologies, and to see how they could be used to help your start-up “start”, please give the Complete I.T. team a call for an initial chat.