Companies (especially small businesses) often shy back from stepping into the cloud (Office 365 / Azure).
The main reason for this is usually the argument that the costs are too high compared to a locally running infrastructure. In addition, the costs differ in terms of tax effectiveness -> one-off payment versus running costs.
I would like to clear up these concerns here and present a way to take the step into the cloud without having to abandon the concept of a one-off payment (once a year). This is a feasible way, especially for companies with up to 5 employees.
The path and the solution is a "Microsoft Action Pack Subscription".
What is a Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS)?
Sometimes a video says more than 1000 words.
MAPS stands for Microsoft Action Pack Subscription. It's an affordable yearly subscription for under $500 a year, that will unlock a lot of possibilities and benefits, if you work in a "Windows" shop.
Benefits include (my favourites):
- Ten Windows 10 Enterprise (upgrade) licenses
- Three Visual Studio Professional licenses
- 5 Office 365 (E3) seats
- US $100 of Microsoft Azure credits per month
- 1 x Exchange Server Standard 2019 + 10 x Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 Standard CALs
- 10 x Office Professional Plus 2019
- 1 x Windows Server 2019 Standard
- 10 x Windows Server 2019 Remote Desktop Services CALs
- 1x Windows Storage Server 2016 Workgroup
- To be continued.......
Just the Office 365 E3 seats are reason enough to make use of this offer.
At the moment (07.06.2020) an E3 subscription costs $32.00 user/month.
Over a year, means this:
5 x 32 $ per month x 12 = 1920 $
As you can see, the investment pays off in any case and you have the possibility to keep your existing infrastructure at the state of the art and slowly make the transition to the cloud.
If you have any further questions on this topic, please contact me personally via Twitter or e-mail.