By Donna Hemmert
AIS Network Vice President, Strategic Development
AIS Network is a proud provider to the Commonwealth of Virginia and its agencies and so we are always concerned where our customers are concerned. We know the pressure many of the Virginia agencies are under to provide top-of-the-line IT services so recently when Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s governor, called for a 4% reduction in agency budgets, we knew our eGov customers would be looking to us to collaborate on ideas.
Luckily, there are strategies in IT that definitely allow you to cut costs without cutting service. The place where most organizations have recently found savings is by moving to the Cloud and a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. According the KPGM, the Cloud/SaaS market has been growing for this very reason – cost savings. SaaS pricing is helping organizations do more IT with less money.
With this model, you really are focusing your IT budget on resources, as opposed to hardware or software. The benefit is that you can purchase the exact resources you need (processing, storage, memory) and upgrade them quickly as required. This eliminates planning around hardware including the expensive hardware replacement cycle.
An additional benefit of Cloud and the SaaS model is that the ability to apply temporary IT resources becomes very easy and is no longer nearly as costly. This can be beneficial if you have a temporary project, such as a website around a promotion or project, or in the case of software development where developers really appreciate the flexibility of quickly deploying virtual machines as needed.
Because in the cloud, the cloud provider does all your support, maintenance, and performs any emergency support, man-hours are reduced and the need for around-the-clock staff is reduced. This is especially relevant in the case of mission-critical applications where the servers need to be working around the clock.
So, if you want to save money while still delivering top-level service, consider the Cloud and SaaS. And, as always, we are here to answer any questions.