Every accounting business thrives to become more efficient and competent each day. And in order to deliver the required results, it needs resources, especially, a well-planned IT infrastructure that is both reliable as well as cost-efficient.
Many of you might be using on-premise IT infrastructure to accomplish your day-to-day accounting tasks. It might seem to work initially, but once the business sets off, the time, money, and efforts required to keep up with ever-changing hardware and software demands can affect the growth of your accounting firm. Therefore, you need a system that is both time-saving and cost-efficient.
One of the most effective solutions to achieve the same is to migrate your practice to the cloud-based servers. Herein, your data is stored at off-site data centers and maintained by third-party service providers. This eliminates the pain of managing in-house infrastructure so that you can focus on aligning your customer needs.
Here are seven reasons to dump your on-premise IT infrastructure and move your accounting business to the cloud.
1. Mobility
The work of an accountant is no more limited to the local office desktop. There are times when you might need instant access to your clients’ financial data from any remote location or have to connect with your team from your home.
Working with on-premise IT infra will restrict your movement to local devices. You might have to stay back in your office to meet deadlines and work on urgent matters.
Related Post- Mobile Accounting: All That You Need To Know
Implementing cloud technology enables you to work from anywhere and at any time via any internet-connected device such as laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. It helps to improve productivity in the long-run and offer better serviceability to clients.
Moreover, you can collaborate with your team of accountants, CPAs, tax professionals, and other stakeholders to work on a single project in real-time, even from the comfort of your home.
2. Maintenance
IT infrastructure needs constant maintenance to function optimally. Additionally, you have to update the hardware and software resources on a regular basis for a seamless accounting process.
In an on-premise setup, you are the one responsible for accommodating servers, repairs, maintenance, and other pertaining issues. This comes with added complexities and consumes a lot of time and effort.
Moving the accounting process to the cloud implies that the servers are managed by third-party service providers. You no longer have to maintain bulky physical servers and keep a note of its timely updates. This further helps to shift the focus from these tedious tasks to business strategies that will add more value to your accounting firm.
3. Uptime
Server availability is an essential factor that determines the consistency of your accounting services. Any disruption in the workflow can cause a loss of precious time and money for the firm.
Deploying in-house servers require a separate IT team to ensure the seamless functioning of all the services. Also, in case the main server crashes or becomes non-functional, it will add significant downtime to your accounting services.
However, cloud hosting providers ensure the all-time availability of their servers. Most of the competent service providers guarantee maximum possible uptime. For example, Ace Cloud offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee of its services, i.e., the server downtime would account for less than 6 minutes in a year.
| Availability Measure | Downtime Per Year | Downtime Per Week |
| 90% (one nine) | 36.5 days | 16.8 hours |
| 99% (two nines) | 3.65 days | 1.68 hours |
| 99.9% (three nines) | 8.76 hours | 10.1 minutes |
| 99.99% (four nines) | 52.6 minutes | 1.01 minutes |
| 99.995% (four and a half nines) | 26.28 minutes | 30.24 seconds |
| 99.999% (five nines) | 5.25 minutes | 6.05 seconds |
| 99.9999% (six nines) | 31.5 seconds | 604.8 ms |
Credit: Wikipedia
Moreover, you get improved performance as the cloud providers deploy High-Performance Computing (HPC) servers for parallel processing so that multi-tasking can be done seamlessly without any interruptions.
4. Security
Financial data lies at the core of an accounting firm. Therefore, security is one of the major concerns for any company.
According to a survey by RiskBased, there were 3,813 data breaches that exposed 4.1 billion records between Jan 2019 – June 2019.
Having a physically-confined infrastructure may help you maintain a level of control over the system, but implementing various security measures and upgrading them to safeguard the information from various security threats can be tedious as well as expensive.
On the other hand, despite the common misconception, cloud vendors protect your financial information by executing different measures that include:
- End-to-end encryption
- Multiple firewalls
- Multi-level authentication
- Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDS/IPS)
- Anti-virus and anti-malware
- DDoS protection system
It further has a positive impact on the customer satisfaction rate and helps to improve the reliability of your accounting business in the market.
5. Affordability
Every business looks for ways to cut-down it’s expenses. However, the cost of implementing hardware and software resources is high.
On-premise IT infrastructure involves deploying physical servers, desktops, and other utilities that might cost you a fortune. Moreover, maintaining the local servers needs a cooling system and power backup, which adds to the budget.
Cloud technology reduces operational and capital expenses substantially as there is no need to invest money for infrastructure setup. Since you can work from any internet-connected device, the constant need to upgrade the resources is also minimized. You can implement the work-from-home policy to save money spent on transportation.
6. Scalability
As the accounting business grows, you need to add more and more resources to the system for a seamless workflow. This can become troublesome at times.
Investing in the local IT infrastructure limits the availability of resources such as storage space, RAM, number of users, and more. So, it is crucial to go for more scalable options.
With the use of cloud technology, you can easily upscale or downscale the resources as per the business demands. For example, during the tax season, you might need to outsource some of your services. With the help of cloud technology, you can add the number of authorized users to your accounting process in order to accomplish the critical tasks.
7. Backup
Accidental loss of data due to hardware failure, fires, natural disasters, or power blackouts can occur at any point of time without any prior warning. Therefore, it is vital to backup your critical financial and tax-related data on a regular basis.
Backing up this data at local devices or servers might not be able to safeguard the information in the event of any disaster at the office location.
Moving your accounting process to the cloud ensures that your data is backed-up regularly at off-site data centers. Moreover, the competent hosting providers offer disaster recovery services, wherein your data is stored at multiple data centers, separated geographically. This ensures redundancy and business continuity, even in the case of any natural disaster.
To Sum It Up
It is high time to dump your on-premise IT infrastructure and adopt cloud technology. It will allow you to focus solely on your client needs rather than investing your time and money on hardware, support staff, server rooms, and other utilities.
Still confused about choosing the cloud for your accounting business? Call our Solutions Consultant at +1-855-223-4887 to know more
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