Hardware is tiered: How the cloud makes this irrelevant
One of the frustrating things about IT hardware is that it generally is tiered. That means that you can’t add just as much as you need for today, spending for only what you need. Instead, when adding hardware to meet increasing demand, you generally have to add capacity and fixed quantities. As a result you pay for capacity that will go unused until you experience future demand. You have to pay for capacity that you presently don’t need. Essentially, you are wasting money on something you can’t use today. Additionally, hardware capacity purchased to meet peak demand times also sits unused in off peak periods. Again, money is spent for storage or requirements that may sit idle for extended periods. Meeting peak demands means capex spending for capacity that may go unused a majority of the time.
Why is this a bigger problem for small schools than for larger? There are two reasons.
- For a small institution, each purchase presents a much larger percentage of fixed costs than that same purchase will represent for a large organization.
- Small schools generally don’t have deep pockets that make investments in mostly unused capacity financially tolerable.
This is where the cloud offers a real advantage to smaller schools. By moving your storage and operations to the cloud, you only have to buy what you need. And you only pay for what you use. Need increased capacity for a few peak weeks of the year? You just scale up and down as needed. No more paying for unused capacity to accommodate peak periods of customer demand. In short, the cloud offers an entirely different model for meeting increased and fluctuating demand. By moving storage and operational computing to the cloud, small schools can eliminate many of these capex costs. Talk to a cloud provider to understand how the cloud model could benefit your organization.