Moving to the Cloud – Is It Expensive?
There are a lot of businesses out there today, both big and small, that are beginning to be faced with a difficult decision concerning the management of their IT resources. Company servers are getting older and slower, causing applications to take longer to run and files longer to access. Their infrastructures are built around technology that is rapidly becoming obsolete and a lot of companies, especially smaller ones, are holding off on replacing their hardware until they can either find a more cost effective solution or see a little more bounce back in a very difficult economy that has been unpredictably slow in rebounding.
A lot of information is floating around the web lately, both good and bad, concerning cloud storage. There are opinions on both sides of the table, from several experts, saying that implementation of cloud storage as a company’s IT solution is either good because it is convenient and the way of the future, or that it is bad because of some of the high prices charged by some of the more well known providers. There are other concerns, such as security, learning curves and implementation into current infrastructures. With all of this information floating around about the cloud, and all of the conflicting views, perceptions about the technology are becoming cloudy as well.
Most of the people who claim that cloud storage is a bad move believe so solely because of the cost. The big three providers who offer enterprise options (Google, Amazon and Dropbox) are way out of the price range for most small business needs, and even big business needs due to economic decline and the need to reduce overheads as much as possible. For a company with 20 employees, for example, the average cost of cloud storage from those big three providers is around $100 per person per month, which is way beyond reasonable.
As a result of these exorbitantly high prices, there is simply no return of investment, nor is there any possible justification that can warrant paying those fees, which for that company with 20 employees, amounts to at least $2,000 per month or $24,000 per year. So companies are choosing to purchase new hardware, upgrading their servers. Even though this is also expensive, it is largely a one time investment and the ROI is very quick. It just makes good business sense, common sense to pass up on switching to the cloud if it is going to cost this much to implement into a business setting.
But there are other, lesser known providers out there that offer the same type of enterprise service, if not more, for a fraction of the price. OpenDrive, for example, offers business solutions for as little as $5 per month with 100Gb of storage and single user access. Adding more access only costs an extra $1 per user. So for example, if you are running that same small business with 20 employees and need 1TB of storage, OpenDrive can provide a viable solution, packed with tons of productivity and connectivity features, for only $35 per month or $350 per year. That’s not $35 per month per user, it’s $35 per month total.
So when you stack up cloud storage against new server equipment at such a low price, switching to the cloud makes more sense than ever. Switching to the OpenDrive cloud makes the most sense.
Take a drive with OpenDrive today!
