Cutbacks, Budgeting restraints, Departmental reviews - whatever you want to call it there is no escaping the fact that there are as Mr Osborne put it “Tough times are ahead”.  I recently read and article by the head of the Russell Group talking about an “academic meltdown” and that “one of the world’s greatest education systems could soon be on its knees.”  I personally think we are seeing some alarming headlines and big assumptions being made leading to some knee–jerk reactions,  maybe we should all just let the dust settle  and re-focus on the task in hand – The fact of the matter is we all have to be more careful in areas of investment of IT.

In my lowly opinion there are two ways of looking at the, I’ll call it a “situation” that we are in. One we can all close up shop and do nothing and just get glossy eyed when something new hits the sector or two we can maybe look at things that were maybe on the perifal but never got realised.

Here’s one “The cloud.”

So budgets are tight, yes?  Then there are good solid reasons for dusting off your marketing bumf and taking another look at cloud services.  Most institutions/organisations are targeted for lowering their carbon footprints  –  Cloud services can certainly help in this area due to being “off- premise” therefore you have a instant reduction in server/power usage, also storage can now be transferred to the cloud meaning that you could potential reduce not only the server usage but also the number servers required –  It’s also worth considering the reduction to wear and tear of your in-house tin possibly extending the life-time of units.

Sounds great however it’s usually at this point that data security rears its head... This is a justified concern and vendors have been listening – It’s fair to say that security is now as tight as hopefully your own on-site system’s with most  vendors providing security suites  to protect your users and data and also technical support for these services is also incorporated reducing demand of your IT helpdesk –another cost saving.  Better still to academia some solutions are free of charge – so if you take the example of a student/staff email solution like Live@EDU -  you save on power, storage (5Gb email box +25Gb Skydrive for each user available) licensing and technical support services.

Food for thought maybe!

If you are interested in cloud services why not give me a call on 0161 906 2233 or speak to your account manager.