Top 3 reasons firms use private cloud

Four Habitat3 clients share their top 3 reasons for choosing to host their data and applications in a private cloud.

1. Tamworth Tax Team (small tax accounting firm) 1-5 staff

For Julie Staples, Director of Tamworth Tax Team moving to cloud hosting saved huge amounts of time.

“Prior to hosting our HandiSoft tax lodgement software in a private cloud we spent hours every month working with our local IT guy resolving problems with our local server equipment. For some reason every time he came onsite to fix something, another part of the system failed shortly after.”

Julie’s top three reasons for using private cloud hosting are:

1. Saves time

2. Great support

3. Reduces stress

“As a small firm we need to stay focused on our clients and our fee earning work. Using Habitat3 for our hosting means we have a very responsive helpdesk to call if anything goes wrong and a fixed monthly subscription to keep our IT costs in check. We just wish we’d found Habitat3 five year ago!” Julie says.

2. Blue Frog Optics (independent optometry practice group) 10-15 staff

Lharn Howard, Principal Optometrist at BlueFrog Optics says centralising all the data associated with his three optometry practices in western New South Wales means his business is more efficient with centralised functions like marketing, recalls, appointment setting and stock control.

“Our staff have great flexibility in managing the functions of practices because our software is hosted in a private cloud allowing access to the same data and functionality from all the practices, from my laptop and from my home PC”.

Lharn’s top three reasons are:

1. saves time

2. peace of mind (don’t have to continually think about backups etc)

3. support

“As we operate a regional business we found hosting our software with Habitat3 ensured far less downtime than our previous onsite system. We could never find any good local IT support. We also really like the peace of mind that comes with having Habitat3 manage all our data backups” Lharn said.

3. Torrens Legal (startup law firm) 1-5 staff

Phillip Del-Paggio, IT Consultant for Torrens Legal chose to host FilePro on a Habitat3 private hosted server as the new start-up law firm needed to hit the ground running and avoid any up-front costs.

“We were really impressed with how quickly Habitat3 organised our new system and they worked directly with FilePro to ensure that the server was prepared correctly for the software,” Phillip said.

Phillip’s top three reasons are;

1. Small company, so no high investment in onsite servers 2. Speed of setup / provisioning of the server/software 3. Ease of expansion for future growth

“Using a private hosted server gave us all the privacy and security we needed but also the flexibility to grow in the future. This type of solution is perfect for start-up firms who need to get moving quickly, don’t want to spend a lot up front but also need high levels of data security,” Phillip said.