While IT vendors typically lead a product pitch with cost benefits, it should be no surprise that cost savings alone don’t always drive IT purchases. For many organizations, revenue growth may represent an even more compelling driver.

Cloud compute and cloud storage have in many circles become synonymous with cost savings and improving an organization’s bottom line. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of the cloud is the ability to help organizations increase their top line revenues.

How exactly does cloud enable you to do this? Let’s examine 5 ways below:

1. Stand up more IT infrastructure than you could otherwise afford: While this may seem counter-intuitive, successful organizations have the ability rapidly scale  their business based on customer demand, and this often requires a relatively massive IT infrastructure. For example, think about the impact on a little-known website with a great idea that suddenly gets an influx of traffic after a positive New York Times or Wall Street Journal article. Traditional IT infrastructure requires capital and maintenance requirements that may be unfathomable for companies still in the growth phase. Unlike creative financing solutions which only ease the capital expense, cloud eliminates the capital, setup and maintenance burdens, providing on-demand IT infrastructure to help your business grow.
2. Focus your next hires on growing your business: A 2012 ESG survey showed that up to 72% of IT dollars go to maintaining existing infrastructure. With storage capacities growing at a rapid pace, why continue to add headcount to maintain infrastructure at the same pace? Instead, use cloud storage to minimize IT maintenance, focus existing IT personnel on delivering business-driven initiatives (such as new premium services – see below) and hire strategic talent in marketing and sales to directly increase revenues.
3. Create new premium services for your clients: Deploying a new service for your clients may involve a development, test and production effort, requiring a significant financial commitment toward infrastructure during the planning stage. With pay-as-you-go cloud, there is far less investment and commitment in going from concept to deployment. Simply start small and as development reaches milestones, continue to add necessary infrastructure on demand. With cloud, you can roll out new services and high-value premium services with a new level of agility your competitors will envy.
4. Use your data to sell smarter. Often the most powerful data to grow your business is sitting in front of you, but may not be accessible if you don’t have the infrastructure to store and analyze it live. Whether it is customer profile data, purchase patterns or customer usage data, current and historical data may hold the key to growing your business. With cloud, years of data can be online and available for analysis via query engines available on-demand. Harnessing your data via the cloud can drive the right decisions to grow your business.
5. Recover quickly from outages. Let’s face it, nothing puts a damper on revenues like outages. Prospects and customers alike may lose confidence after a significant amount of downtime and may never return. A recent survey shows respondents using the cloud recover from outages must faster than those who do not. Cloud enables the secondary server and storage infrastructure that can help your business recover quickly from outages. With rapid recovery, your customers may never realize an outage even occurred.

If these potential top-line benefits are meaningful to your organization, consider introducing cloud into your IT strategy. At the same time, you’ll also benefit from the bottom-line cost savings of cloud.

If you already use the cloud, tell us what top- and bottom-line benefits you’re experiencing on Twitter or on our Facebook page.

Bookmark to: