Managing Director, Justin Dean, leads the team of technology professionals that has developed something of a reputation for being evangelists for cloud solutions. “For some years now, the advantages of the cloud have been all over the business media. It’s not just specialist publications - you can find it in the mainstream too - in outlets like The Times, The Guardian and the BBC. Essentially, it’s a topic that has become widely discussed at a senior level in businesses of all types and sizes.”
“The advantages are clear, but there are still concerns about security. Big IT security stories about hacking and ransomware don’t help, even though they are not necessarily about insecure cloud services. Serviced Cloud focuses on delivering true business-class services that are secure and avoid issues such as data sovereignty,” says Justin Dean.
He continues, “One of the problems of effectively getting the message through to recruitment firm leaders is that some IT managers act as gatekeepers. The perception of IT workers is that partnering with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) to provision business technology from the cloud makes their roles redundant. But, this simply isn’t the case.”
Provisioning technology and obtaining support from an external source frees the internal IT function to deliver more value to the business. Justin Dean says, “Quite simply, partnering with an appropriate MSP enables IT workers to do less firefighting and be more proactive. This could express itself as a stronger focus on strategic matters, customer facing activity and on CPD, developing the higher level skills that boost career prospects.”
When it comes to recruitment, there are number of areas where the cloud fits well with the entrepreneurial and enterprising nature of the sector. Justin Dean says, “Firstly, it’s scalable and elastic and can rapidly stretch to meet the needs of a firm, taking both organic and M&A related growth in its stride. Secondly, when appropriately designed to support business-class services it is secure and helps meet compliance with the DPA, something that’s critical as recruiters handle large amounts of personal data.”
He continues, “Finally, the recruitment sector is a bellwether of the economy. Other sectors look to the recruitment industry to see what is coming and might gain a little time to prepare. Recruiters have less warning of what is coming and are one of the first to feel the pinch in a downturn. There is a need for the recruitment sector to minimise costs at all times and adapt quickly if things start to go south.”
“The cloud lets recruitment firms have the fully featured and secure technology they need at a significantly reduced cost. For a typical 50 person firm the cloud comes in at around 17% less than an on-premise system over 3 years. More than that, it enables recruiters to take those IT services for a fixed cost.”
Moving to the cloud, a process termed ‘migration’, is a key point where Serviced Cloud has developed a philosophy that is in tune with the needs of clients. “Migration costs are time-based charges for such overheads as configuration and copying data. The more sophistication and data, the higher the cost. £15,000 wouldn’t seem unreasonable for some migrations. However, we take the long view and factoring in the lifetime value of a company subscribing to cloud services enables us to provide cloud migration services free of charge,” Justin Dean says.