By Pete Mann
According to the recently published IDC profitability survey of worldwide consulting firms, 3 out of 4 firms plan to implement a cloud solution in 2014. In fact, the cloud services market is expected to double from $45 billion to $95 billion in the next few years. If you're one of the many firms looking to focus more time on growing revenue and expanding client services—and less time on maintaining the systems that run your firm—then pack your bags, as a move to the cloud is in your future.
Too Much Baggage
For most consulting firms, maintaining multiple front-end and back-end systems requires a number of resources and makes reporting on business improvement metrics difficult. IT resources are too busy maintaining their firm's information environments, and don't have the time to pull critical reports on customer lifetime value or customer retention rates. Without this vital data, expanding your service offerings and better understanding your clients is nearly impossible. If poor insight and cumbersome maintenance are hindering your firm's growth, it's time to figure out an alternative to your enterprise conundrum.
Why the Cloud Move Makes Sense
Cloud systems allow you to have the same technology advantage as your competitors—without the same overhead costs. Accessible from anywhere, cloud-based solutions provide the benefits of an on-site deployment, without the expensive up-front licensing, hardware expenses, complicated deployment and costly, on-going maintenance. They also eliminate most of the ownership costs and responsibilities–enabling your IT resources to focus on more important work for your firm. You gain the efficiency you want, while leaving security, hardware administration and software maintenance to dedicated experts.
Improve Visibility. Increase Client Focus.
Trusting software and hardware administration to someone else means your IT team can focus on something else. In freeing your IT team from cumbersome system administration, you'll find tremendous upside in bringing more insight to your staff, translating into more value for your clients.
• Reporting. A single view of your client project data provides the insight needed to make better business decisions regarding your clients. This improved data can help your firm determine new services to offer, and new industries to enter—to better serve your clients.
• Responding. The cloud equips you with a seamless environment to on-board a new user, set up a new approval process or quickly establish a new service line. Without having to modify multiple systems or maintain brittle interfaces among them, a connected system in the cloud helps you respond easily in a world of constant change.
Cloud Benefits for Your Firm
Cost and reliability advantages lead the list of a cloud-based solution benefits, along with security, availability, privacy and maintenance. When making the move to the cloud, consider the following:
• Security. In addition to the multiple levels and forms of physical security, make sure your cloud provider employs stringent procedures to limit unauthorized access to the components of your cloud offerings, including personnel, servers, applications and clients' data.
• Availability. Your business is mission critical, and you need your cloud provider to use extensive monitoring, routine back-ups, and regimented fail-over and disaster recovery policies to help provide consistent availability.
• Privacy. Confidentiality and privacy of your firm's and clients' data is paramount. Ensure your cloud provider keeps all client data in all forms—including at rest, in-flight or in back-up environments.
• Maintenance . Be sure your cloud provider offers all necessary maintenance to the cloud solution, including the infrastructure at the operating-systems layer, and database and periodic updates to the application—to gain assurance that your cloud solution is consistently current at all levels.
Making Your Move to the Cloud
Don't spend one more day trying to make sense of bad data, or one more dollar trying to maintain the systems behind it. Discover how cloud-based solutions can quickly bring your firm together on a single, easy to use and access enterprise solution. Leave maintenance to someone else, so you can focus on serving clients—and ultimately, growing your firm.
Pete Mann is the VP of Product Management at Deltek.
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