Credit Union Cloud Savings

by Kirk Drake

If you believe nobody could do your IT for cheaper than your team – than this post is for you.  However, if you think that spending 10 to 12% of your credit unions annual revenue is nutty and you think theCredit Union Cloud Features are for you – than read on.

Cloud computing can be calculated in many different ways. Amazon tends to price most of its cloud services on processor cycles and overall usage measured real-time. We have found this method to be very difficult to provide adequate budgets to our clients. Credit Unions tend to operate with very thin margins and really want to know how much their expenses are going to be over time. Ultimately, this means that we look to price things with a bit more consistency.

There are two or three components required to price cloud. Users vs. Servers

The end-user side of the equation includes virtual desktop, hosted voice, applications, and devices. We use a combination of number users + number of apps used on a monthly basis. So if a credit union had 50 employees, Microsoft office, e-mail, phones and call center – we would price the solution based on number of virtual desktops + number of employees using e-mail + number of employees using secure messaging + number of employees using iphones vs. droids etc. Essentially, all of the costs are linear and directly attributable to departments and usage. The beauty of this is that if you have 50 employees one month and 48 the next, your costs go down. Or if you want to use Microsoft project for a key project for 5 employees for 3 months – you only pay for it for 3 months. Also, all of these strategies eliminate upfront capital costs.

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