How Small Businesses Can Save Money

Most small businesses spend a lot on energy bills, even as much as $20,000 per year. This is extremely expensive. According to energy experts, small businesses that are struggling with such exorbitant bills need to rethink their energy policies. Saving on electricity costs can help these businesses lower their expenses. This will boost their overall revenues and efficiency for growth. But even in the face of these realities, what energy-saving models can small businesses use to lower their energy costs? The adoption of cloud computing is one of them.

IT businesses especially stand to gain a lot by adopting cloud computing. For many small businesses where manufacturing is not involved, electricity costs are mainly attributed to their IT departments. In fact, from a recent survey carried out by the CDW Corporation, 52 percent of all companies have asked their IT departments to cut down on electricity consumption-costs. Cloud computing (using work applications stored on remote servers) is a valid alternative that brings energy savings to these businesses.

Cloud computing can help businesses reduce energy-consumption costs through virtualization of essential IT functions and servers. This entails consolidating data centers virtualized through an external provider at much lower costs. According to a similar study, this helps an organization to directly cut energy consumption by as much as 28 percent. Considering small businesses spend a lot of their revenue on electricity costs, these savings can be significant, depending on the size of the organization.

The following factors are the results of virtualization and can help an organization save money by reducing its electricity costs.

• A small business does not have to host a local server. The server needs are met by a central provider that maintains it. As a result, the small business does not have to keep the server room running at all times as is often the case. Instead, they can enjoy efficient, cost effective electricity consumption.

• Committing work applications in the cloud encourages employees to telecommute. If your business’ work applications are hosted in the cloud, your employees can work off your business premises. This not only helps your business save on space costs, but also on energy bills.

• Integrating cloud solutions can also help businesses reduce energy expenses they would otherwise incur if their maintained their servers. Naturally, by having all server hardware off site, cooling, conditioning, and general maintenance energy consumption are cut. Overall, this enables your businesses save costs.

Considering all these, if a small business adopts cloud solutions for their daily IT functions, they can save energy.  Therefore, if your business is struggling with huge energy expenses, its time you reconsidered your IT service functions status on the site. If it was on the cloud, you could save a lot of money and fasten your growth.

By Walter Bailey