Tom Acworth, CEO and owner of Nottingham based PHF Services shares his experience in dealing with good and bad cloud service providers.

Although Tom encountered problems with his first provider, he is still is very much in favour of cloud-based systems.

This is an extract from an interview between Tom Acworth and Heath Roberts, Marketing Director of Axess Systems.

During the interview, Tom identified various the reasons why he feels all business owners of SMEs should evaluate moving their IT systems to a Managed Cloud Provider.

1. Invest in areas of your business which will generate you the best return – The amount of resources you can invest in your business is always tight. So focus your investment on aspects of your business which will create revenue and healthy returns. Tying up your capital in an often over-provisioned depreciating asset like IT is not going to generate the best return on your investment.

2. Your cloud IT systems will use enterprise-grade IT Hardware – As an SME it would be highly unlikely you could afford to invest in the IT Hardware to the extent of the hardware you have at your disposal in a Managed Cloud Service.

3. You can scale and only pay for what you use, not what you think you need in 3 years. How many times have IT professionals told you the reason they are recommending a system with extra capacity is that you will eventually grow into it? Why! With a Managed Cloud Service you only need to pay for what you need today. So if you need less tomorrow, you pay for less.

4. You can recruit IT staff who are focused on creating you a competitive advantage not keeping the flashing lights on. When hiring IT staff, make sure they add value by creating a competitive advantage for you. We recruit highly skilled developers who improve our applications, and not IT administrators who merely keep the systems online.

5. You get to pick the brains of IT and technology professionals – By working with a technical specialist, you can pick the brains of highly skilled and knowledgeable people. Use them to help deliver cost reduction exercises and aspects where you can increase revenue generation opportunities.

6. You don’t get nasty surprises from your IT team asking for more money – no more upgrades needed.

They’re all done for you, remotely, while you’re asleep in bed.

7. You don’t need to employ expensive 3rd Line support staff to administer your systems. With increasing complexity comes the requirement to hire highly skilled 3rd line support staff. But as you no longer need to resolve technical problems with your IT systems, you don’t need to employ these types of support staff.

8. You get Business Continuity as standard – This is not the on many CEOs shortlist of things which you must do. However, we were affected by a significant fire in Nottingham, which meant our offices were off limits for three days. So we all worked from home, and our customers didn’t notice.

9. You never have to worry about your IT Systems. As a CEO you have a different relationship to work than your staff. You rarely switch off, and the sheer volume of mental stress. So why create things to worry about. It just works, and you don’t have to worry about your IT systems. You’ve got enough on your plate.

10. It opens up possible new recruitment opportunities

– By enabling your staff to work from anywhere, anytime, you can open up new recruitment pools.