If both domestic and reciprocal tariffs are creating uncertainty over the final cost of your business technology, now might be the best time to consider looking into the cloud as a solution to increasingly expensive infrastructure upgrades. When the time comes to replace your aging servers and other physical hardware, migrating your critical applications to a hosted environment can save you a significant amount on your capital expenses and overhead.
Continue reading below to learn more about how hosting your mission-critical systems in the cloud can save your business from tariff-related technology price increases:
How the New Tariff Environment Affects Your Technology Infrastructure
While there remains uncertainty over the actual final rate of the current administration’s tariffs at the time of this writing given ongoing negotiations, it is clear that the costs of certain imports and goods from certain nations will continue to increase. This will include materials used in manufacturing components such as those that power a lot of networked technology hardware, from microchips and servers to printers and computers.
The impacts of these and other costs will also likely have ripple effects that will lead to more costs and other challenges:
- Component shortages – As different parts of the supply chain feel the impact of the tariffs, it will affect resource and material availability, including from suppliers scaling back or deprecating allocation altogether in extreme cases
- Longer procurement timelines – Once supply and value chains are disrupted, the resulting bottlenecks will make it take longer to procure and deliver equipment, stretching upgrade projects from weeks to months potentially
- Persistent surcharges – Historical data shows that even once tariffs are reduced, prices often remain the same and can even continue to increase, meaning that the higher hardware costs are not going to drop any time soon
- IT labor constraints – To offset the increasing expenses, many businesses opt to try to extend the lifespan of their hardware; however, this usually leads to in-house IT employees being overwhelmed with constant maintenance and short-term fixes
- Mounting security vulnerabilities – The longer legacy hardware takes up space in a tech stack, the more likely it is that platform gaps and bugs will create security vulnerabilities – especially once manufacturers or software publishers stop supporting your systems
Breaking Free from the Hardware Refresh Cycle
Traditional IT infrastructure set ups force you into a continuous, often expensive cycle of hardware replacement roughly every 3 to 10 years, when legacy servers and other networked equipment will need to be exchanged for newer pieces to maintain performance and interoperability between machines. However, each of these cycles brings not only significant capital expenses, but also additional risk during migration and downtime.
Hosting your various applications, data and networks in a secure, cloud-based environment eliminates many of these burdens and presents opportunities to lessen the financial load on your IT budget. By working with a trusted cloud service provider (CSP) that understands your software needs you will also be able to optimize your hosted infrastructure for your desired level of scalability. CSPs provide their own data center (or centers) to handle your hosted applications, platforms or network infrastructure, unlocking opportunities to scale resource bandwidth without the burdens of onsite deployments.
Navigating the 2025 Tariffs with Strategic Technology Decisions
By strategically migrating your on-premise IT systems to the cloud, you will be able to open up opportunities to turn these types of market disruptions into an accelerator for growth and efficiency. Without the limitations and burdens of a legacy tech stack, your business will be able to scale your resources and bandwidth much more effectively, and transform how you approach budgeting for technology investments. This will include capturing benefits such as:
- Predictable Costs – Turn your unpredictable CapEx costs into predictable OpEx expenses for your financial reporting
- Improved Performance – Ditch the underwhelming utilization rates on-premise servers for optimized cloud data centers
- Cut Down Overhead – Eliminate expenditures for supporting hardware like storage space, electricity consumption and temperature control for your servers
- Remain Scalable – Leverage burst capacity and scale your computing resources as you need instead of paying to maintain hardware at peak performance year-round
- Sustain Resilience – Position your business to better handle changes in demand and resource availability without having to manage major physical infrastructure overhauls
- Protected Data – Preserve your data integrity and ensure business continuity in the event of an incident with more frequent and secure backups in the cloud
- Support Remote Work – Enable secure, reliable access to business applications from anywhere without additional hardware investments
- Allocate IT Bandwidth – Free your IT staff from constant maintenance to focus on innovation and business-driving projects that generate revenue
Why Businesses Choose SWK Technologies for Cloud Hosting
SWK Technologies is an award-winning service provider for both cloud and on-premise solutions, able to leverage expertise from multiple channels to provide you with a hosted environment customized around your business’s unique pain points. SWK’s managed services are also SOC 2 certified, with a team of experts knowledgeable in NIST and HIPAA security standards as well as various industry-specific regulations such as FINRA, NYCRR and ISO. When you host your Sage or Acumatica ERP with SWK Technologies, you gain a foundation of cybersecurity and reliability that protects your critical data with multiple layers of defense and hygiene, including regular backups, encryption protocols, endpoint detection and response (EDR) monitoring, and a security operations center (SOC) running 24x7x365.
SWK’s Secure Cloud Hosting (SCH) also delivers a more scalable, tailored and cost-effective alternative to more general hyperscaler services like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. While these providers offer broad-range solutions geared more towards enterprise environments, SCH is built around the needs of SMB and midmarket ERP and CRM systems such as Acumatica, Sage 100, Sage 300, QuickBooks and Infor CRM, with a team of experts consolidating support for your software and IT. By choosing SWK Technologies for your cloud hosting needs during this period of tariff uncertainty, you gain a partner who will help you navigate both immediate technology challenges and long-term business requirements.
SWK Will Empower You to Have Confidence in Your Technology Again
Stop letting outdated server costs eat into your ROI and your team’s productivity when you can host your mission-critical systems and data in the cloud, and capture better speed and performance while doing so. SWK Technologies will help you move away from traditional IT environments into a modern, flexible cloud-hosted infrastructure that grows with your business and empowers your teams to get work done.
Contact SWK here to schedule your cloud readiness assessment and discover how we can help you navigate the tariff impacts on your technology investments with confidence.