Save Time and Resources by Moving Credit and Collections into the Cloud

Everyone has heard about doing business in the cloud, but few truly understand the benefits that they can achieve. There are hidden costs of infrastructure and people that go beyond the obvious costs of hosting your own environment. Moving your credit and collections solution into a hosted environment removes the often-surprising costs and frees up your team to focus on improving cash flow.

When you host your own environment, the easily identified costs are generally the cost of the hardware, the internal IT cost for setting up the solution, and of course the cost of the actual software itself. The hidden costs that are often overlooked are related to setting up and supporting networks, including sufficient bandwidth and firewalls. The maintenance to ensure your environment remains secure and continues to be accessible 24x7 is also overlooked. Additional audit requirements are placed on your teams to prove that access to the environment is controlled, secured and tested, and to see that a disaster recovery plan is in place. Another overlooked cost is the power necessary to run the production environment and the test environment plus the cooling requirements to make sure the hardware doesn’t overheat. It really can get overwhelming when you look at the full picture.

The ignored people cost required to support your own environment revolves around the technical expertise required to make sure everything works as desired and your teams are able to connect to the environments. These skill sets may involve a solution architect, engineer, developer, Operating System expert, security and more. Building the environment takes someone to provision the necessary equipment, installing, configuring, securing, integrating, testing, documenting and educating support. All of this just to get started. Actually operating the environment requires an Administrator to monitor, manage capacity, complete upgrades, diagnose issues, repair problems, complete backups, recover from errors, and for general consultation on keeping the environment running. There are a few other benefits that are achieved from taking advantage of a hosted environment.

• Quicker ROI – Easy deployment and standardized implementation methodology coupled with pre-defined workflows mean your team can begin realizing the benefits right away.
• Lower operating costs – No upfront hardware costs and lower overall software costs can be spread across a flat monthly fee.
• Latest and greatest versions – Private cloud solutions combined with a managed upgrade service simplify the process for upgrading your environment to the newest releases.
• Latest and greatest versions – Private cloud solutions combined with a managed upgrade service simplify the process for upgrading your environment to the newest releases.
• Security – Companies can benefit by working with a vendor (and should be looking for a vendor) that has a robust cybersecurity program in place.

Even after exposing all of these hidden costs, why do companies choose to host their own environment? For some, it is a company mandate. For others, it is a concern over security. However, some simply never realized the true cost of running their own environment. Whatever those reasons have been in the past, companies are now looking to the cloud for hosting their automated credit and collections solution to help drive results.