The total cost of ownership associated with owning and operating on-premise software typically exceeds the price of the license and ongoing support.

Additionally, the opportunity cost of maintaining and upgrading these systems often comes directly from resource utilization. Fortunately, cloud solutions offer an alternative that reduces or even eliminates many of these costs. Accruent's cloud software is creating a compelling business case for organizations to replace their antiquated on-premise maintenance management systems. In the second post of our three-part series, we will discuss what benefits the cloud brings to Facilities Services and IT teams.

Facilities services benefits of cloud:

Eliminate Upgrades

The most compelling benefit of moving to the cloud is that your initial implementation is essentially the last upgrade you will ever have to complete. With cloud solutions, the vendor makes sure that your system is patched regularly, that you always have access to the latest functionality, and that you never fall behind on product and security updates.

Two important questions to ask yourself or your system administrator are:
  1. Are you currently on the latest version of your software?
  2. How much time transpires between a new product release and your eventual upgrade?

Staying on top of on-premise upgrade cycles is difficult and time consuming. Removing upgrades from your system administrator’s responsibility will free up this resource to focus on more impactful and strategic elements of their role, such as system optimization, user training, strategic dashboard and report creation and facilitates the annual plan and budgeting process.

To learn more about the benefits of moving to cloud, check out our solution.

Improve system accessibility.

A cloud system is more accessible because, as a relatively new technology, it offers native wireless support and accessibility from any web-enabled device. Rather than calling the help desk, your users and customers are empowered with the ability to submit and monitor requests from their PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Improve user adoption and customer satisfaction.

Because a cloud solution is built as a website, it eliminates confusing navigational elements and is designed to match contemporary user experience expectations. Your users and customers will no longer be fighting with the system design, so requests can be entered more quickly, and work crews are enabled to better meet departmental service level agreements.

Share community experience.

An often overlooked benefit of true cloud offerings—compared to on-premise or hosted products—is that there is a single code-base shared across an entire customer base. That means that every customer is on the same version, and the software version the vendor is testing and coding against is the exact version that is delivered to their clients. Due to the disparate configuration, patch versions, and hardware setups innate to on-premise software, each client using an on-premise product often find themselves on a unique environment. In this situation, reported issues cannot be reproduced, feature requests can be ignored, and the time required to resolve defects is lengthy.

An important questions to ask yourself or your system administrator: Have you ever reported an issue to your software vendor and received the response that “it cannot be reproduced”?

In a cloud environment, there is only one version of the code, so anything that is identified by the user-base will be immediately visible to the vendor’s support and quality assurance departments. This means that issues are identified and resolved quicker, improvements are shared across all clients simultaneously, and all users of the product can share their knowledge and experience with their peers.

Information technology/services benefits of cloud.

Eliminate infrastructure and reallocate resources.

There is a tremendous amount of infrastructure, resource requirements, and server bloat from the ancillary technology required to run an on-premise system. The server space, physical space and energy associated with on-premise software can be reallocated to other campus systems. Additionally, taking advantage of cloud software means that the burden of responsibility for securing, updating, and optimizing the underlying platform is owned by the vendor, which allows your IT/IS resources to focus on other aspects of their roles.

Make the move.

Do you want to start enjoying the benefits of the cloud? The next step is to create a business case that is specific to your organization. Click here to see what industries we serve. Our team will walk you through an industry-specific questionnaire and provide you with your total cost of ownership for owning and maintain your on-premise system. Our team will provide a cost analysis for moving to the cloud and presentation deck to help you build your business case internally.

Contact us today to build your own business case for moving to the cloud!