Welcome to the final post on this series which focuses on cost reduction in custom software development outsourcing. If this is the first post you are tuning into, then I suggest you look here and here for earlier posts.

Since the IT revolution, we have seen the landscape of computing change drastically. Either there are innovative new technologies or collaboration of existing technologies to offer exciting and creative solutions. One such loud and clear solution is Cloud. While some still opine, that use of cloud is threat to security or accessibility, others have started reaping the cost and effectiveness of cloud solutions.

Any software development project must materialize as a product or service in the IT infrastructure of the organization. So, it is only fair that we calculate the project cost including the IT resources that is set up to host the project.

The total cost of maintaining the IT infrastructure vs the ROI to the company is either under estimated or neglected all together. This could be due to lack of visibility in the components that makes up IT infrastructure. The ones that we could easily think of are Power, Internet Services, Hardware, Software, Space, Admin resources etc. And we may not calculate the time spent on maintaining the security, accessibility, uptime etc. into our expenditure calculation.

Solution: Rest in Cloud

The benefits of moving on premise IT infrastructure to cloud are numerous. To list a few

1. Zero Capital Cost: Get rid of upfront costs in setting up your servers. In cloud computing it is someone else’s problem.

2. Lower Power Cost: When you run your own data center, the amount of power usage and waste as compared to efficient hardware is questionable. Whereas cloud is power efficient and uses less power which is again not your problem.

3. Fully Utilized Hardware: Using cloud you can fully utilize hardware needed for running your software application. Your workload is shared with another organization’s server infrastructure. You will never face lag or slow issues using cloud.

4. Lower People Costs: As compared to in-house resources the amount you spend on cloud would drastically reduce your people cost.

If these points do not encourage you to use cloud, consider this : Cloud services were found to be more secure and provide close to 100% uptime than your in-house IT infrastructure.