Cloud Computing Benefits for Finance and Accounting
The Benefits of Cloud Computing to Finance and Accounting
What Is Cloud Computing? Many people now use the term “cloud computing” to describe many varied technologies and services things. Cloud computing is not new per’se. What that simply means is that software applications are delivered using Web infrastructure where the client side is a web browser. Known by another name, this is Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS.
What Are the Major Benefits of Cloud Computing to Finance and Accounting?
Location-Independent Data Access
SaaS cloud hosting delivers on the pledge that has been spoken about in the software business for decades: location-independent data-access. Firms and their clients gain access to whatever they want from wherever they are.
There are major benefits if you’re a multi-location business. No longer must we be concerned about exchanging files through e-mail, telephone calls, or waiting until their computer is online another time.
Eliminate the Headaches and Cost of In-House IT
From Mark Linden at Intact –
For many of us, we run in-house IT because we think we have to. It really doesn’t contribute anything that differentiates the business. So why do it? Why invest those resources, and that time and energy in building an IT infrastructure that doesn’t differentiate you in whatever the core value of your business is? You’re much better off taking those reources and that management time and focusing on new customers, new products, new differentation, than worrying about building an IT organization just so you can run your in-house application. When you use Software-as-a-Service, you avoid having to build that in-house IT. You’re avoiding all that cost, all that hassle, things like capacity planning meetings, budgeting for IT, all that goes away. You focus just on the business applications you want to buy, and the cost is explicit for what it’s going to take to get access to them.
A World-Class IT Operation Far Better Than You Can Deliver Internally
A worldclass SaaS vendor is a professional technpology company. You get a premium IT service, far exceeding what you can contract for and deliver yourself. SaaS providrs make a living on uptime, so if the application is not there, they can’t sell it, and they can’t get paid. So these are true world-class environments, running at 99.9%+ availability with very minimal maintenance windows. There are auditing standards for service providers, specifically SAS 70 Type II audits, that give you external assurance. And they all run 24×7 availability. You don’t have to worry that “my application went down, it’s Saturday, where is my IT guy, is he on vacation?” All those issues go away.
Security, Rundundancy and Backup
U.S. BASED
All of our servers, backups, data centers and tech support are based in the United States. None of our IT or engineering is outsourced or sent overseas, ever. Automatic off site backups are done nightly and kept for a minimum of 30 days.
256-BIT ENCRYPTION
Each time any user logs into the Cloud9 Real Time system to access data it is thru 256-bit encryption offering you peace of mind in the security of your transfer. With the same security as Online Banking, your data couldn’t be safer.
DATA CENTERS
Our data center is a SAS-70 Type II Certified Center that features
12+ Megawatts of uninterrupted power
Cisco firewalls
Cisco routers
Mirror disks
RAID implementation
N+1/2N or better Redundancy
Biometric hand scanner
CCTV Digital Surveillance
Motion Detection on all data center floors
Seamless private Layer 2 transport
Achieve a Higher ROI
SMBs will often realize a far higher ROI with cloud SaaS applications. This is in part due to the obvious IT cost elimination. Part of it is that SaaS applications are feature rich, written relatively recently with the knowledge of the past. And part of it is more subtle costs that you don’t necesssarily think about initially.
There’s no upgrade cost with SaaS-hosted software apps. newer versions of the application are updated automatically.
According to Kevin Jackson at Forbes –
When implemented properly, the cloud computing economic model can drastically reduce the operations and maintenance cost of IT infrastructures. A 2009 Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) study concluded that a cloud computing approach could save 50 to 67 percent of the lifecycle cost for a 1,000-server deployment. Another Deloitte study confirmed that cloud deployments delivered greater investment returns with a shorter payback period when compared to the traditional on-premise delivery option.
So What Should You Do?
If you are an accountant, CFO or company owner seeking to replace your present accounting system, you really must include cloud-based or SaaS applications on your evaluation short list. Talk to us and let us help you learn more about how Cloud9 Real Time can improve your business bottom-line and alleviate IT stress and anxiety at the same time.
Remember Cloud9 Real Time, the #1 rated accountants’ cloud in the industry.
