Top 3 Ways Cloud-Based Solutions Can Save IT Costs for Your Small Business Leveraging the cloud can completely transform your tech operation, saving you money and enabling your business to scale faster and better.

It can be quite intimidating for a small business to adopt new technologies during a digital transformation, but there are plenty of benefits that can come from investing in a cloud-based system - and significantly reducing your IT costs is a big one. After all, a lot of hardware goes into powering a business's technology in addition to the manpower and expertise to keep everything operating as it should.

If you were able to quickly and easily move your IT to the cloud and save a significant amount of time and money every month, wouldn't you do it? We spoke with several specialists from Vonage to help uncover how moving your IT operation to the cloud can reduce your spend while bringing your small business to the next level.

1. Eliminate hardware costs.

Traditional IT solutions are hardware-based and typically on-premises at your company. They can be incredibly complex to operate and maintain and require physical connectivity. On top of that, it can be surprisingly expensive to move whenever your SMB needs to relocate offices or locations, says John Antanaitis, VP of Global Portfolio marketing at Vonage.

These on-premises solutions require not only the physical IT infrastructure but also utilities such as electricity to keep their machines in service. When migrating to a cloud-based system, you immediately eliminate the need for physical hardware, which in turn, can lower your operating costs.

"When you shift to a cloud-based solution, your small business can also boost its competitive advantage by reducing those operational costs," says Leon Frankel, Director of Product Management at Vonage. "For example, at Vonage, we still support physical telephones if companies want to use them, but the key here is that when they switch to our Unified Cloud Communications Platform, they don't have to pay for servers, switchboards, or network hardware. Implementation of the cloud solution is simple enough to be handled in house and small businesses also don't have to invest in the long-term maintenance or upkeep of that physical hardware, server updates, or even redundancy with a cloud platform."

2. Simplify the entire process with all-in-one solutions.

A lot of cloud-based solutions provide more than just a single service, which can help reduce your need for multiple bills and vendors. Having one vendor for multiple solutions can also help you save money when troubleshooting–rather than chasing down multiple vendors, you can simplify your support process and save money on downtime by pursuing all-in-one cloud-based solutions.

"When you silo your meeting solutions, calling solutions, and texting solutions, for example, it creates unnecessary complexity," Frankel says. "Those all-in-one solutions are incredibly cost-effective if done right."

With Vonage's Video, Voice, and SMS APIs, customers can access calling, texting, and video calls all from the same platform or within popular integrated technologies, such as Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and more, all through an affordable pricing model that only charges you for what you use–nothing extra.

3. Enjoy greater scalability and watch your business grow.

Cloud-based solutions can be great long-term investments, because when you choose a solution that you can grow with, you can only benefit from the scalability, especially from cost savings and growth perspectives, Frankel says.

For example, high-growth companies often outgrow their vendors–their products or services simply can't keep up, which can cost growing SMBs an exorbitant amount of money in downtime while switching vendors. Cloud-based solutions aren't restricted by physical hardware, therefore scalability is more readily achievable.

Since Vonage's communications platform is a Saas (Software-as-a-Service) offering built in the cloud, it can scale up resources on demand and add more features with immediate integrations as you require them.

Click here to learn more about Vonage's cloud-based offerings and how they can reduce your business's IT costs.