Hybrid Cloud Solutions: A Balance between Finance and IT Teams

Hybrid cloud solutions can solve one of the biggest challenges in business. Budget. Nearly every company struggles to match corporate infrastructure and departmental needs with the right budgetary allocation. 

In your own experience, you may have found that the two departments with a near constant struggle on this issue are IT and finance. On-premise solutions have high costs in hardware, labor to support, real estate, licensing, and more. Cloud hosting solutions can be complex and introduce entirely new concerns for the business, especially where compliance may be a consideration. 

Hybrid cloud solutions offer a way to meet a business’ needs for both the latest technology and a practical budget, providing a best-of-both-worlds approach that allows for a measured migration and scalable middle-ground between on-premise and full-cloud deployments.  

What is a hybrid cloud? 

A hybrid cloud includes both on-premise and cloud hosted servers or virtual instances of your data. The hybrid cloud architecture leverages the security and added computing power of an off-premise cloud solution without compromising the control and privacy of essential on-premise infrastructure. 

We discuss why so many organizations have chosen a hybrid cloud model in “Hybrid clouds: an ideal choice for most businesses”. 

For IT and finance departments, the benefits of the hybrid cloud go even further. 

Benefits of a hybrid cloud for IT and finance 

It is over-simplification to say the benefits of a hybrid cloud are only about cost and spend. Yet, hybrid cloud solutions easily provide quantifiable financial benefits. 

Scalable cloud solutions translate to savings 

Onsite technology requires hardware, software, maintenance, and upgrades. You can put a clear number to each cost. You can also project the costs for adding new employees, adding new technologies to meet the needs of remote workers, and future updates that will be needed. 

With a cloud hosting solution, factors like upgrades and maintenance disappear, being part of the package. Application updates are included. Giving employees access can also be as simple as adding a new user to the application. 

Like onsite technology, both finance and IT know the costs. The big difference lies in fewer line items or consolidation of technology costs. Simpler application management also means less time invested by IT staff in traditional – and time-consuming – application and hardware updates. 

Simplified disaster recovery protects productivity 

How much would your business lose if it had to shut down for a day? 

By moving some applications into the cloud, especially productivity tools like Office 365, you limit downtime due to disaster. 

Disaster recovery solutions can help reduce data loss and time lost due to outages and the unexpected. Being in the cloud, access to an internet connection can be all that is needed to get back to work. 

Instead of spending that money on ever-growing physical storage methods and creating redundancies to ensure business continuity when faced with disaster, you can help make your data disaster-proof by implementing a hybrid cloud solution. Implementation has an initial cost, but the spend for a cloud solution is far smaller than the cost of traditional capital-intensive disaster recovery methods. 

Strategic Staffing

A hybrid cloud offers a way for an organization to meet evolving IT computing needs without needing additional staff to manage it. This make it a great option for companies stretched thin with personnel or with limited resources. The company can focus growth and resources in the areas of the business which will deliver the biggest impact, instead of allocating resource to support redundancies. 

Hybrid clouds: a practical and cost-effective approach 

With a hybrid cloud, you gain the benefits of an operating expense financial model with customized controls and standards that meet your company’s business needs. It enables IT to deliver the technology and computing power the organization needs while meeting budgetary demands. For IT and finance, it’s a win-win. 

Have questions about how a hybrid cloud solution might help your business? Connect with a Ricoh IT services professional to see how we can help. 

Source:  RICOH USA