Azure IT Budget

Planning next year’s IT budget is a consistent challenge for IT leadership.  Your budget needs to cover all the items that you already know: Software licensing costs, personnel, known upgrades, known projects, and ongoing maintenance.  The hard part comes when trying to assign a budget to accommodate all of the items that you don’t definitely know: unexpected break-fixes, unbudgeted project expenditures, and necessary moves to keep up with Industry trends.

 

A budgetary planning process can speak to a number of those planning issues simultaneously by including Microsoft Azure in your budget for next year.

 

Going to Azure provides a cost-saving approach to address:

  • Software Licensing Costs
  • New project buildouts
  • Platform Stability, Backup, and Recovery
  • Platform ongoing maintenance
  • Decreasing capital expenditures
  • Decreasing overall IT expenditures

Aside from being the Top IT trend of this decade. . .

How does Azure Address these budget issues?

The quick answer: it saves you money

By moving applications to a cloud-based platform like Microsoft Azure, your business can take advantage of the dramatic economies of scale that are offered by Microsoft’s massive Azure platform.  In practical terms, it is more cost effective to centrally manage, maintain, secure, and back up the hundreds of thousands of servers in the Azure platform.  The alternative is that each of the thousands of companies using the Azure platform need to handle their servers themselves; and that’s inefficient and costly.

Most of the money that Microsoft saves by handling the server infrastructure issues themselves get passed back to individual Azure users as cost savings . . . a win for everyone involved.

A second side benefit of this approach is that individual companies can move the (often capital) expenses associated with maintaining server infrastructure to a cost basis, with significant tax advantages.

Repeated studies have shown both the tax advantages, and the overall improvement in ROI that Azure displays when compared to similar functionality deployed on premises.

HOW does it save me money

By utilizing one of the Azure Software as a Service (SAAS) offerings, your enterprise can simply license the use of a given software package or database on a monthly basis.  Microsoft will handle all of the infrastructure related tasks (server optimization, hardware break-fix, patches, backups, etc. . .) while guaranteeing a 99.9% uptime for your environment.

When comparing a 3 year ROI (3 years being the typical amount of time between major software system upgrades) between:

  • Building out a new environment on-prem, including hardware, software licensing, and maintaining that environment for the 3 year time period. –or-
  • Licensing an identically performing environment in the Azure cloud for the 3 year time period.

Total cost for the Azure environment over that 3 year time period are 40% lower than the on-prem environment.  For more detail on how this is calculated, please see:

http://geekswithblogs.net/hroggero/archive/2013/02/25/sample-pricing-comparison-on-premise-vs.-private-hosting-vs.-cloud-computing.aspx

Art2link stands ready to help you get your budget numbers right, and to help you take advantage of the cost savings that Azure can offer to your enterprise.

To find out more, click HERE.

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