Saves Your Staff Time: Maintaining your own on-premises server takes time. You need to handle the maintenance, backups, and updates yourself. Not to mention, if your system goes down, you’re the one that has to figure out how to fix it. That means staffing someone to maintain the server, hiring a third-party person to repair it, or pulling one of your more tech-savvy team members off their regular work to find a solution. By entrusting a cloud provider, you get the benefit of having their team on-call to address any system interruptions. They will also be responsible for keeping your system up to date.
Reduced Server Costs: As you already know, servers aren’t cheap. You can end up sinking a lot of money into maintaining and updating your server. First, there’s the cost of hardware—many dedicated servers are rented for $100 to $200 per month. Servers over 3 years old have a 10% probability of failure and that number jumps to 20% by year 7. This means you should be replacing your server every 3-5 years. Then, there’s the cost of software updates. You need to make sure your security software is up to date, your data is backed up, and your disk space isn’t full. That kind of maintenance takes a lot of time and money. If you’ve got an IBM Maintenance Contract, you know how hard it is to get on and expensive to keep. If you don’t have an IBM Maintenance Contract or adequate security measures in place, your server is a sitting duck for cybersecurity threats.
Faster Disaster Recovery: When you’re responsible for backing up your own system, it can be easy for backups to fall to the wayside. After all, you’ve got a lot going on every day at your dealership and backing up data is tedious. But if you don’t regularly back up your data, you can pay the price later if your system goes down. With so many floods, tornadoes, and storms in recent years, dealers who are maintaining their servers on premises are at a huge risk of losing their data. When your data is hosted in the cloud, your data is backed up in real-time. That will help your system can get back up and running much faster, with up- to-date information.
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