Running an accounting firm is not an easy task. You and your team are involved in dealing with several different clients and their expectations from your accounting expertise. Keeping your client’s data safe is your responsibility.
If you have been saving the business-related data locally on the computers installed in your workplace, you may be thinking it is the best way you can keep it safe. But it is not true.
Cloud technology is even better. Even though this technology was less mature a few years back in time, but the scenario has changed now. Cloud has impacted almost all spheres of accounting businesses. It is known to keep data safe along with many other benefits. Keeping your eyes closed to the advanced cloud technology means more risks than benefits.
Here are five reasons why you haven’t yet opted for the cloud to leverage its benefits for your accounting firm
1. You Feel Data Is Safe When It’s in Your Office
Keeping your client’s data saved in your office computers may seem like a good idea. But you cannot deny the fact that there is always a risk of data loss in all offices, no matter where they are located. It can happen because of natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods.
Similarly, man-made events like cyberattacks and data breaches can harm the data. At almost all times, your client’s data saved within your office is at the risk of being lost.
However, you can mitigate this risk by storing important data on the cloud. Renowned cloud service providers have well-facilitated, highly secure data centers to keep the data safe. Not just that, these service providers perform regular backups and follow similar other data loss prevention methods as well.
With the help of cloud technology, you can assure your clients that their data is fully protected. It will give them peace of mind, while also building their trust in your accounting firm.
2. You Think Paying the Required Overheads Gives Peace of Mind
If you have been running your accounting firm for a good number of years, you must have realized the competition out there. Charging higher fees for your services may make you lose some of your clients.
Controlling operational expenses is not an easy task. To maintain your reputation in the market, you need to operate with minimum budget overhead possible. Simply put, outsourcing your internal infrastructure, be it hardware or software to the cloud cuts the overhead cost.
Moving to the cloud means you do not have to worry about investing in and handling in-house servers, software, and business applications. You can avoid being the victim of hard drive failures, slow performing processors, inefficient motherboards, old versions of software, etc.
The hired cloud hosting provider will take care of it all at a fee that is much lower than the expense of maintaining the internal infrastructure on your own. As a result, you can get to save more money than ever before.
3. You Believe Your Men Can Best Handle Your Internal Infrastructure
Depending on the size of your accounting firm, you must have hired a few employees to deal with the IT-related chaos. Maintaining servers, upgrading them timely, having required software installed and updated on computers, etc., doing it all is quite challenging for IT professionals. Also, you need to pay them their salaries for the work done.
To further add on savings, you can hire a managed cloud hosting provider that has in-house resources to address all the IT-related issues. They will provide round-the-clock IT support services as you expect. It will help you cut cost in hiring tech professionals within your firm.
4. You Think It Is Best to Work for Your Clients from Your Office Only
All the CPAs in your accounting firm work for a limited number of hours in a day when they are in the office. Every useful software and business-related data is accessible only when they are in the office premises. But if this is how you have been running your accounting business, how will you handle sudden urgent tasks raised by your clients?
In today’s time, quickly responding to your client’s concerns can give you an edge over the competitors. Otherwise, you may even lose some of your clients. Of course, you can’t delay some urgent tasks to the next day at work. But neither you nor any of your employees can work on them if everything you need is in your office and you are far away from it.
To add flexibility at work, cloud technology can help you a lot. All the data and business applications hosted on the cloud can be accessed remotely, from anywhere and at any point in time. This way, you and your team will be ready to work for your clients whenever they need your help, no matter if it is at a time outside the regular working hours.
5. You Feel Downtime Can’t Be Avoided When Scaling the Resources
When scaling up the in-house infrastructure, you might have always believed that access to data will be affected, though for some time. But it often happens that the migration of data and resources when scaling up the infrastructure takes more time than expected.
For instance, you may need more storage space to save the client’s data and higher RAM for the smooth performance of installed applications. Upgrading all the systems will take time, which means loss of productivity at work. But with the help of cloud technology, you can prevent this from happening.
When saved on the cloud, all your client’s data and the hosted business applications are always accessible. This is because the renowned cloud service providers such as Ace Cloud Hosting offer 99.99% uptime guarantee, which is useful to maintain productivity at work always.
Recommended Reading: Things to Look Out for While Choosing A Cloud Service Provider
You can even ask the chosen cloud hosting provider to scale up the server specifications on the cloud whenever needed. This process of scaling up resources will happen in almost no time on the cloud.
Wrapping It Up
As an accounting firm owner, you can easily understand that all your clients expect excellent service from you. Cloud technology will help you plan the next level growth of your firm. Software installation on the cloud, regular backup planning, security maintenance, server management, etc., the hired cloud service provider will take care of all these IT related needs.
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