Cloud Consultants Case Study

For small & mid-sized business owners/managers in the Washington DC area, the costs of having a consultant professionally manage your network, servers and computers is a significant overhead cost. In recent years, “The Cloud” has enabled businesses to save thousands of dollars each year by effectively relocating critical business IT functions to a shared datacenter. Cloud service providers offer a number of advantages over on-premise IT services: lower-cost, higher availability, redundancy and lower maintenance costs. With all of these benefits, Qualatech’s cloud consultants are experts at leading Washington DC businesses into the cloud. Below, I have outlined a recent successful cloud migration our cloud consultants performed for a small business in Washington, DC.

A Typical Small Business Cloud Migration Scenario

Let’s suppose your business has 25 employees and utilizes an in-house Microsoft Exchange server. Your server is about 6 years old and you need to replace it. You are interested in determining if a migration to the cloud is the most cost-effective solution for your business.

Assumptions

In order to obtain an accurate cost comparison, we need some basic assumptions:

Life-Cycle

IT Industry best-practices state that average server life cycle is 4-6 years.

Administration

Administration will be required whether your email solution

in on-cloud or on-premise

. Tasks are generally defined as account creation, configuration changes, resource calendar setups, etc.

Maintenance

We will assume that

on-premise servers require approximately 1 hour of maintenance per month

(Windows updates, etc) at a cost of $135/hour (Qualatech’s Cloud Consultants rate). Cloud servers would not incur costs for maintenance.

Cloud Email Cost Benefit Analysis Comparison
	Hardware/Software	Administration	Maintenance	Migration/Installation	Cloud Service Fees	Total
25-User On-Premise Email Solution	$10,000 (server, software)	$8,910 (1 hr/month x 66 months)	$8,910 (1 hr/month x 66 months)	$2,160 (16 hrs @ $135/hr)	$0	$29,998
25-User Cloud Email Solution	$0	$8,910 (1 hr/month x 66 months)	$0	$6,750 (2 hrs x 25 users)	$6,600 (25 users @ $4/user/month)	$22,260

In the scenario outlined above, a business with 25 employees would save approximately $7,738 over 6 years. But there’s more to it than cost savings: 1) The business will realize almost zero downtime as a result of moving their email solution to redundant cloud infrastructure; 2) As the business stays in the cloud, total cost of ownership (TCO) will only increase as there will be no additional need for migration costs. If you would like to learn more about migrating your business to the cloud, contact us here and request a meeting with one of our cloud consultants.