The Cloud: Worthwhile for all company founders

Any owner who views his com­pany as a start-​up often has at least one foot in the Cloud already. Because it’s easy to con­ceive Cloud solu­tions as an eco­nomic oppor­tu­nity for a new com­pany. But even com­pany founders and man­agers in tra­di­tional sec­tors and indus­tries who don’t see them­selves as start-​ups in the con­ven­tional sense of the word should also become aware of the ben­e­fits of “as a ser­vice” prod­ucts.

Ini­tial instal­la­tion: Keep­ing a tight grip on costs

One of the key ben­e­fits of Cloud solu­tions is cost con­trol and the abil­ity to claim costs against tax imme­di­ately. It is not with­out rea­son that guide­books for com­pany founders start with the sub­ject of cap­i­tal. Here, it makes sense to con­sider how avail­able funds can be deployed most use­fully. Pur­chases which are sub­ject to depre­ci­a­tion and which can’t be re-​sold or can only be re-​sold with dif­fi­culty (as for exam­ple in the case of soft­ware licences) tie up equity unnec­es­sar­ily.

The Cloud and the tax author­i­ties: acqui­si­tion costs ver­sus oper­at­ing costs

When pur­chas­ing licenses, the risk increases in sit­u­a­tions where it is dif­fi­cult to pre­dict HR trends. Founders who rely on tra­di­tional licences can either buy cheaper licence pack­ages in advance or pur­chase an expen­sive indi­vid­ual work­sta­tion licence for every new employee. Here, too, it’s worth con­sid­er­ing flex­i­ble, expand­able Cloud prod­ucts. They offer the advan­tage that the monthly invoices are fully tax-​deductible as oper­at­ing expenses.

Sea­sonal peaks: Retain flex­i­bil­ity with Cloud solu­tions

For exam­ple, Microsoft offers monthly sub­scrip­tions for its Office 365 prod­uct, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to absorb the costs of sea­sonal capac­ity peaks. Com­pa­nies only pay for the licences they actu­ally need. For exam­ple, a start-​up com­pany such as an online shop could take on extra staff for Christ­mas and only book the required office pack­ages for this period. Its IT costs are scaled accord­ingly and are only incurred where required.

Work how you want and using what you want: Where licence mod­els con­strict, Cloud solu­tions offer a more relaxed fit

Pro­fes­sional Cloud prod­ucts such as Office 365 are now fully fledged busi­ness solu­tions which also work reli­ably offline. At the same time, they make col­lab­o­ra­tion eas­ier, either through shared fold­ers or inte­grated com­mu­ni­ca­tions solu­tions such as Skype for Busi­ness. Cloud solu­tion licence poli­cies also take founders’ ways of work­ing into account. Many prod­ucts have no restric­tions on oper­at­ing sys­tems or device types, or per­mit a suf­fi­ciently large num­ber of ter­mi­nals per pack­age. Whether Mac OS or Win­dows, PC, lap­top or smart device – a sin­gle Office 365 licence allows you to install the Microsoft solu­tion on up to 15 devices.

Free up your mind for your core busi­ness

With this approach, the office is always exactly where com­pany founders want to work. And as an added bonus: Fol­low­ing instal­la­tion, your mind is freed up again for more impor­tant mat­ters than IT. IPD NOW is the per­fect IT solu­tion for start-​ups – for hip cre­ative minds or depend­able crafts­men alike. Click here for more infor­ma­tion.