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/ Published on 01 July 2013

Are you thinking of moving to Google Apps or Office 365? Or do you already use Dropbox, Box, Webex, Salesforce or one of the many Cloud services now on offer? Or do you want to know why you should even care?

Cloud providers can offer more flexible services at a cheaper price than most enterprises can achieve by amortising their equipment and maintenance costs over a large number of customers.

More important than lower prices, Cloud services promise to improve productivity. Users or business units can receive required capabilities “now” rather than wait for months for IT to design the answer to their wishes.

You also receive fault-tolerance, disaster recovery and uniform access from many device types – all contributors to productivity by helping your employees get their jobs done, whenever and wherever they are.

Cloud services can also improve productivity in the IT department by freeing up IT staff to focus on solving company-specific problems rather than looking after consumerised infrastructure such as mail servers, file repositories, CRM systems and the like.

Few companies gain significant competitive advantage by having a “really well set up mail server” – they’re a dime a dozen, yet expensive to maintain internally.

So why burden your IT staff up with mundane tasks when they could be designing business-specific process improvements and extracting business intelligence that will help your bottom line?

While moving to the Cloud offers clear productivity benefits, there are pitfalls to avoid in order to reap these benefits fully.

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