CAPITAL: The Voice of Business Issue 1, 2015 | Page 90

Opinion Leader | Technology

Financial
benefits
of cloud
computing
F

inance managers and business owners across South Africa are looking at innovative ways to ensure they are
getting the most out of their budgets. They want to ensure that they are able to justify all of the costs they incur and
that all new expenditure adds strategic value to their operations. However, IT can be the vehicle through which business
operations will be transformed and drives such long-term
gains as boosting customer sales, enhancing staff productivity and efficiency, cutting costs and improving customer
service. IT is much more than just controlling costs, but the
current fixation on financial performance, although justified,
sometimes clouds this issue.
BETTER BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY COSTS LESS
Being asked to reduce costs whilst still adding value to
the business is no easy task. But smart investments can be
made to tackle this problem. Now is the time to invest in
solutions that will ensure the business is well equipped to
harness an efficient, flexible IT infrastructure with the very
latest applications to enable greater efficiencies. There is a
fundamental shift taking place in the way businesspeople
use IT and pay for technology. The recent explosion in
‘cloud computing’ solutions—made available through the
internet on a pay-as-you-go basis—now offers an appealing
alternative for every finance manager or company owner.
Cloud computing gives organisations an alternative to
buying and maintaining costly in-house infrastructure and
allows users to securely access their business applications
whenever they want to and wherever they are. Because there
is no hardware or software to buy, businesses can avoid all
up-front costs, eradicate the unpredictable nature of IT and
demand more in