One of the motivators of moving to the cloud is the economics of it. And as technologies evolve so do delivery models. If we take a quick look at history, we can see the same thing happen with electricity. Now, a ubiquitous fact of life, it was once the cutting edge of technology only available to those that could afford to purchase, house and maintain a generator. With time, the production of electricity became centralized as companies began investing in large power plants that allowed them to deliver electricity to its customers and charge for that they used thereby taking electricity from luxury to utility. Soon, sooner than you think probably, cloud services will become a utility as well.

There are a number of ways to go into the cloud. Private and public cloud being two of the more popular ways. With Office 365 and its hosted Exchange service, it is difficult for almost any business to make a case for keeping an email server on premise. The cost of the hardware, the configuration, installation alone will run you several thousand dollars. That is before the ongoing cost of maintaining the system. One Exchange server has the capacity to hold several thousand mailboxes. Whether you set up 12 or 1,200, the cost of the hardware and software is still the same. With Office 365, you pay for the boxes you use. Same goes with their Team sites and OneDrive services. Each offer 1 TB of storage space for your employees to save files and collaborate for about fifty cents a day per employee. At about fifty cents a day, you get the hardware space for storage, and the software to install on up to five systems for that user. The savings on the software license alone is a good reason to seriously consider cloud and subscription options.

With cloud services companies making the investments into hardware, software and infrastructure, giving its customers the same benefit of economics of scale that the electric company does to modern day businesses, going cloud more often than not makes good budgetary sense. You aren’t running a generator to power your office, after all?