The question should rather be “Can I NOT afford to use G Suite?”

On any scale of economy there are few businesses, big or small, that can afford the massive network infrastructure that is Google. With this infrastructure come a number of benefits that small and medium businesses can only dream of. Things like 99.99% up-time guarantees, always availability, hardware redundancy, and on and on… quite literally a never-ending wishlist of features that all businesses should really have but just plainly cannot afford.

So what do I mean by afford? What all is encapsulated in this phrase that puts it beyond the reach of small and medium size businesses?
To start off with you have to look at hardware – the right kind of hardware – not the cheap stuff small businesses have to buy because its all they can afford.
Then you have to move on to software. The software we are talking about that multi-national companies run to manage and safeguard their data and storage.
Then to put all of this together for you (and keep it running), you require highly skilled IT professionals. The kind who’s salaries put your CEO to shame.

So what to do? You can impossibly afford all of those luxuries on the turnover you generate. Do you just have to learn to live without it and continue to run your business on desktop PCs functioning as mini servers and kept running with spit and praying?

Well the short answer is NO. The long answer is DEFINITELY NOT. You can get all of those benefits even on your shoestring budget! Cloud computing is the great equaliser. Its the best thing that could have ever happened for small and medium businesses alike. Its levelled the playing field between the businesses with the big budgets and the rest of us who scrape along. It has empowered SMEs to get access to, utilise, and benefit from the same type of IT resources which until a few short years ago only the big boys could boast about.

And the best news is that you will be saving money compared to whatever you are currently spending on your existing make-do environment. Without a doubt, guaranteed. And l’ll proof this in black and white below by making a very simplistic comparison between traditional PC environments (which is what most of us will have) and a G Suite cloud-based environment (where you want to move to – as soon as possible).

Disclaimer: The figures indicated below can obviously vary considerably depending on the type of equipment and software licenses bought, from where you purchased the items, and what the current reigning USD/ZAR exchange rate is. The figures are based on South African Rands for middle of the road hardware, typical retail pricing (including VAT) for hardware and software, and the applicable average exchange rate between 20 July 2017 and 24 July 2017.
We will attempt to update these figures on a semi-regular basis so as to keep the information in this article as current as possible.

Some of the software licenses included use perpetual ownership models but will have to be replaced/upgraded at least every 24 months to keep them current. On the other hand most of the hosting options used are monthly contracts. For both instances a note is added accordingly and this is factored into the final per month cost for each of the scenarios to create an as-fair-as-can-be end-result.

Additional Considerations

To be completely fair to G Suite – so far we have focused exclusively on price to judge its affordability. The traditional environment priced is structured on a non-domain setup. In other words management of this environment is really basic and you have to set, configure and maintain each user individually. Sharing files and data is rudimentary and has to be configured for each PC separately. So not only will the traditional environment cost you nearly 6 times more per month but you will also lack centralised user, security and sharing configuration. Furthermore you have no guarantee that all these applications and services created by completely different companies will actually work together symbiotically.

On the other hand G Suite is out of the box a full fledged multi-user, centrally managed domain-based environment with all of its inherent benefits. To get even semi-close to this type of environment with the traditional setup you can easily add a bare minimum of another R20,000 (or R833 per month) for hardware and software costs.

Other than the most obvious features we compared here, G Suite also includes a ton of extras that most businesses will find value in using but haven’t yet been introduced to. Instead of dragging this bloodbath out even further I will rather draw it to a close here and we’ll discuss some of these extras and their business benefits in future upcoming articles.

So at this point I will venture that it is safe to say that Google G Suite is by far the clear winner in this battle. Not only on price but also in its value-added features.

Can you really afford not to use it??

GooPERTS is a certified Google G Suite Partner and a G Suite expert. If you are thinking of moving your business solutions to the cloud, feel free to contact us for advice and assistance in doing so.