Cloud Integration Services – Another Way to Save Your IT Budget!
Posted by Aaron Goldberg on April 8, 2011
In my final post in this series, I’m not going to spend much virtual paper here going on about the pressure to lower IT costs and reduce budgets. It’s reality, like death, taxes, and bad reality shows. So let’s move to what really matters, and that’s finding initiatives and projects that can help the organization succeed and lower operating and capital expenses.
The solutions I’d like to explore are Cloud Integration solutions, and how to drive the savings we all need from them. In a nutshell, using cloud can cut capital expenditures and reduce operating expenses. The savings focus varies in most organizations between the two.
CapEx Savings
Cloud Integration services have some highly compelling ways to reduce the overall spend. Many of the benefits are similar to the overall Cloud CapEx reduction factors:
- No need to buy, deploy, and manage any new hardware or software to run the solution
- Scaling up the solution requires no additional Capital expense
- Cloud services are operating expenses, not Capital expenses, and move budget from the CapEx side of the ledger
However, Cloud Integration solutions have some important additional CapEx savings that matter greatly:
- By integrating more with diverse members of the supply and demand chain, investment in inventory, plant and other capital equipment can be made more efficient
- Using Integration Services to link more of the “Federated” organizations you interact with, the need for supporting their processes on your systems is eliminated, reducing your need for capital equipment
- Similar gains from the integration of your ERP systems with a broader range of organizations and infusing the system with more relevant information will also identify areas of Capital savings.
OpEx Savings
If we move over the OpEx side of the coin, Cloud Integration services have some hugely powerful financial arguments that augur well for their use. Primary among these are:
- Substantial reduction in programming costs for building interfaces to supply or demand chains, external ERP feeds, and other external data sources
- Reduction of the time needed from the CSO office or security staff to individually react to every external linkage through the cloud
- Lower training and learning costs as technical staff does not have to become conversant in every system, protocol or format a partner may use
- Less need to change existing systems that don’t meet hard-coded interfaces that may come to market for the cloud
As we all know, the need for compelling financial backing to any IT initiative is the reality we live in. Using Cloud-based integration services to drive the linkage of your partners, suppliers, customers and other allied firms not only meets this demand, but the savings are actually quite compelling.
The Cloud will beget a great deal of integration activity. Doing this in the most efficient manner is key, and Cloud Based services are the way to go!
Tags: Capital Expenditures, Cloud Benefits, Cloud Cost Savings, Cloud Integration
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