These days every company has to keep information about their business in digital format, data is related to accounting, operations, clients or whatever the company do to generate money.
Every single piece of this information has different condition to be store, keep and access according with their nature and sensitivity. The drivers of those conditions are regulatory, strategic or controls; and each section has different set of stakeholders.
In order to keep this big amount of information aligned and fulfilling the big amount of conditions, each company has two possible ways:
1. Build their own infrastructure to keep the information safe.
2. Delegate this management to an expert partner.
Both options are valid and extensive uses by different companies in all sectors of the economy across the world.We will analyze both.
1. Own infrastructure:
Due to the huge set of alternatives that the company could select on this way, it makes this way so complicated, you could start from keep all the information in the hard drive of your computer in a good identified set of folders or you could build a huge data center in a remote location.
In general, each requirement that you have to keep your data will generate an extra cost to your company.
If you have to keep three spreadsheets with accounting information from your first year, those spreadsheets should be stored in a pen drive or a CD that have to pay part of your rent during next X number of years until the Tax authorities said that it's not relevant.
Escalate it to the next level, your company has a small sales team that use a local CRM open source application, you have this application running in the powerful desktop that your company have under your desk. You paid a big amount of money for your machine, you have to keep it running all time and you have to contract a guy to keep it in good shape, also, you have to keep a separate backup of the information in CRM database for at least 1 month. You are investing more than one hour per day in keep your infrastructure running and paying an extra cost in your electricity bill on monthly basis. Also, you have to keep the backup safe in a second location that also should have to pay for rent.
Now, your small CRM is a headache, that is consuming time and resources and generating operative dependencies and additional stress changing the focus of the company to support systems in stead of generate money.
If you escalete it to the next levels, could understand that every single piece of data that you put in your company, will generate an infraestructure cost in the future.
2. Delegate it to an expert, cloud expert:
In the same case, you could start working with the spreadsheets in cloud platform editing it online with free tools, and storing it in an online storage that with bill you a couple of cents per month for the usage, once you stop to use this spreadsheet on daily basis, you could move it to a cold storage that generate just a couple of cents per year.
If you escalete it to the next level, you could buy a CRM for about five dollars per month including infrastructure and backup according with complex requirements according with your business needs; if you need to grow your business, your application could configure to escalete in infraestructure to support more traffic; if you need more applications just add to your package in the same infraestructure and increase your bill according with your needs.
In the same case, you could start working with the spreadsheets in cloud platform editing it online with free tools, and storing it in an online storage that with bill you a couple of cents per month for the usage, once you stop to use this spreadsheet on daily basis, you could move it to a cold storage that generate just a couple of cents per year.
If you escalete it to the next level, you could buy a CRM for about five dollars per month including infrastructure and backup according with complex requirements according with your business needs; if you need to grow your business, your application could configure to escalete in infraestructure to support more traffic; if you need more applications just add to your package in the same infraestructure and increase your bill according with your needs.
