The forecast couldn't be clearer: the time for the Cloud has come. While the private sector has been making the transition to Cloud computing for years, state and local governments have had more doubts and concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the importance of cloud adoption crystal clear, so let's see if we can't put any remaining doubts to rest. Here are four of the most meaningful reasons why you don't need to hesitate to make your move to the Cloud.

Savings

Let's break down a few of the areas where the Cloud shines at freeing up your budget.

First of all, your power center is going to thank you- if you still need it at all after your move to the Cloud. We expect our traditional power center to bear the brunt of your processing needs, incurring expenses by requiring data center leases, maintenance costs, expensive hardware, and the Cloud can manage the same load at a fraction of the price. Even if you have many legacy applications that you can't handle a full transition right away, you can still move a hefty amount of your infrastructure to the Cloud and start to realize those savings.

If you're feeling ready to fire your data center, then there's another piece of hardware that's on the chopping block: telecom. For some companies and agencies, telecommunications can wind up as one of their largest expenses. What is worse, they're provided a vastly outranked service by emerging technology for all that money.

Replace your standard PBX with a Cloud service that acts as a platform for data, video, and voice communications. For those who used 8x8 for their transition, organizations saw an average savings of 30% over three years.

If you want to learn more about Cloud communication merits and want a guide for calculating Cloud ROI, see our piece It's Time To Rethink Your Position On Cloud Communications.

Decentralization

Using the Cloud to meet your telecommunications needs serves another purpose beyond just saving you money. It also dramatically facilitates a beneficial operate-from-anywhere process for all agencies.

Before this year, making it easy to work from home wasn't exactly at the top of most agency's list of priorities. COVID-19 changed how a lot of people viewed the value of having a decentralized workforce. While many employees found themselves cut off from their work because their computers or other platforms were stuck at the office, Cloud-users could transition much more effectively to securely access data remotely. Core services were able to continue, and that allowed many enterprises to avoid lay-offs and furloughs.

While the pandemic will be fully in the rear-view mirror one day, the societal shift away from offices will likely have some lingering effects. Being prepared to allow for more people to operate-from-anywhere is, in these times, extremely prudent.

To read more about the operate-from-anywhere process and you can implement it seamlessly into your organization, see our e-book Don't Lock Down Your Growth.

Scalability

Being able to match your budget as precisely to your needs as possible is key to cutting costs, but when it comes to processing power, you're taking a reasonably tricky gamble. You buy the hardware you believe will match the demand but go overboard, and you're wasting money. You purchase too little and can't get everything you need to finish.

You can avoid this headache altogether. Cloud scalability means that your increase or decrease in your processing power as your needs change. Rather than spending days reconfiguring physical hardware, IT administrators can add or subtract their processing power in real-time with no hassle. You won't feel like you've spent too much on the off-season and too little during a spike. Change as you go, with just a few clicks.

Disaster Recovery

Losing your data can be such a terrible feeling with such debilitating consequences that organizations will pay enormous amounts, trying to avoid it. This means sinking a hefty dose of your budget into physical sites that require dedicated maintenance employees, server capacity, and a host of firewalls, routers, and switches that can guarantee your network infrastructure provides you with the data you need.

It's an expensive, time-consuming headache.

More than perhaps all the other benefits on this list, the Cloud can completely cure your Disaster Recovery headache with an efficiency Advil can only dream of. First of all, you no longer need any secondary site with any of its physical requirements. Because everything is stored online and in multiple locations, you can recover data in only a few minutes. Cloud's ability to store data in multiple locations offers a quick recovery solution after unforeseen events. However, comprehending these disaster recovery benefits requires proper education on cloud capabilities. Engage with online courses on cloud computing to harness this knowledge, making your agency resilient against potential data disasters. Like with the rest of your data, you can scale your back-ups as you go and as your needs change. Lastly, your provider will have its dedicated team available to identify and fix problems as they arise.

Regret Minimization

The Cloud is useful because it minimizes your potential regret. It saves you from the guilt of having bought an expensive piece of hardware, only for it to become obsolete after a few years. No longer will you bemoan having prepared for a certain amount of processing requirements to discover that you need drastically more in a high-demand season and drastically less later. When the unexpected occurs, which it always does, you won't lament being so unable to work from home because everything is physically centralized at your office. And should the worst come to pass, and some disaster were to strike, you wouldn't ever experience the grief of having lost all your crucial information because your hardware got caught in a fire, flood, or hurricane. Everything is digital and stored in multiple locations. A single solution can rarely provide that much relief. The Cloud is one of them.