Overview

As a smart player in the cloud industry, Service Centers thrives on their ability to innovate and adapt to market trends. To that end, the Finance team in Service centers was seeking a relevant, in-depth and effective professional billing system to manage their daily basis transaction and invoices of their workforce.

Challenge

As Head of Finance at Service Centers, their task was to raise standards in billing system, across the group.

“Cloud computing occurs when IT resources are off-site and remotely accessed using an Internet connection. A cloud service provider (CSP) now hosts the daily IT resources user access. As a result, the IT resources are no longer physically in a local business’s server farm or data center. Instead, the servers, databases, and IT applications are only accessible via the Internet.”

When a business fully adopts a cloud computing solution, the two most significant benefits are IT cost savings and access to business data from anywhere. Additionally, over ninety percent of the companies that adopt a cloud computing solution claim to significantly improve their cybersecurity posture and meet any mandated compliance requirements.

In addition to better cybersecurity posture, businesses benefit from the CSP storing their business data in multiple locations. Having business data stored in multiple locations also enhances a company’s disaster recovery posture.

Here are some additional cost savings points and benefits when a company selects a CSP:

  • 24/7 monitoring with IT experts – Twenty-four-hour monitoring by IT experts is expensive to duplicate with a company’s IT staff, but the 24/7 monitoring is part of an agreed-upon SLA.
  • Scalability – When a business’s demand increases for its product or services, the cloud service provider will automatically match that demand with increased IT resources and decrease the IT resources when business demand drops.
  • Mobility – smartphones, iPads, and Android tablets can access the cloud like a laptop or desktop.
  • Loss Prevention – Cloud-based servers in multiple locations containing your business data minimize the chances of losing any business data.
  • Automatic software updates – Cloud service providers immediately update any software as soon as the updates are available, which minimizes any potential zero-day attacks.
  • Accessibility at any time – business data is available twenty-four hours a day from any location in the world, providing a reliable Internet connection is available at the location.
  • Less downtime – with business data stored in multiple locations, one cloud computing location can be offline for maintenance while the other sites are still online.
  • Competitive edge – Businesses that move to a cloud computing solution gain a significant advantage by reducing IT labor and IT resource costs versus businesses that keep everything in a local business server farm with continued IT resource costs.

The cost savings and the myriad of concerns regarding a business’s local data center’s availability are eliminated, provided the IT manager has chosen the right cloud computing and deployment models. Each cloud computing model and deployment strategy are slightly different, which dictates cost and any remaining behind IT staff.

“Every organization is different, so IT managers must form a project charter covering the intended purpose with clearly understood objectives for implementing a cloud computing solution. Whether an organization is large, midsize, or small, stakeholders from each LOB need to provide feedback for an IT manager to make the best decision for an organization..