Would you build a power or water filtration plant for your business? The answer for 99% of us is no, that would make absolutely no sense. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution many large factories DID build their own power plants. There was no distribution network or centralized power plant to connect it to. This was the only way to have access to reliable and consistent power for the factory.
The Information Revolution has followed a very similar pattern. At first, we purchased a very expensive PC (Personal Computer) and set it up in our physical office. Next a distribution network (The Internet) was developed, and finally a central source of power (The Cloud) was connected to it. Today having a server in your office to handle email or file sharing is the same as running a power plant out back!
A number of business owners continue funding capital intensive power plant (server and software) installations in order to avoid subscription based technology services. Replicating the scale and efficiency of your local utility company by producing your own power and water is never considered, but an email server….let’s do that in-house.
To help business owners understand why technology subscriptions are a requirement for today’s world it’s important to review these three key points:
- The time to spin up subscription based services is substantially less than in-house implementation. Ditto for ongoing support costs. (Your internal IT group will NEVER own up to this, as we are now talking about JOB security)
- Subscriptions are a utilization based pricing model. Just like power and water, you pay for what you use. No more capacity planning or wasted capital dollars.
- Access to subscription based services can (almost always) happen from anywhere. No more VPN connection back to the office or datacenter.
You can obtain all technology services you need today on a subscription basis, including the hardware! It is a shift that needs to be embraced by business owners as a way to increase the scalability and efficiency of their business operations. It will pay off in the long term!