Relocating a business is an expensive proposition, although one that can rarely be avoided when a company is quickly growing. While there's no way for a business that's outgrowing its current office space to avoid paying commercial movers to move the company to its new location, there's one surprising way to reduce the cost of the move. If your company is about to move its headquarters, upgrading your computer systems to a cloud-based solution could help you save on your corporate relocation.

Looking at Labor

If your company is considering shifting from a locally hosted computer system to a cloud-based solution, it makes sense from a labor standpoint to do this when you're relocating. Regardless of whether you're moving physical computers or transitioning files to the cloud, your IT department will have to be intimately involved with both processes. Files stored on company hard drives must be backed up before the hard drives are moved, a task which IT should ensure is done properly. Similarly, when implementing a cloud solution, your IT personnel will need to move files from local drives to the cloud.

If you're moving computers, you'll need to pay your IT department to backup the files. Why not pay them to implement a cloud system instead? This way, you won't have to pay them to first back up files and then move those same files to the cloud a few months later.

Looking at the Move

There are two other, more direct, financial reasons to implement a cloud-based computing solution before moving. Keeping your company's data in the cloud will make packing easier and reduce your insurance needs, both of which could reduce the cost of relocating your business.

Computers aren't heavy or large, but they require special attention during a move. About Money recommends:

• removing all computer cables and packing them separately
• securely wrapping computer monitors and hard drives in bubble wrap or moving blankets, not putting them in boxes
• never stacking monitors on one another

Your employees may be able to unplug cables, and possibly even wrap their monitors and hard drives. Moving companies, however, will need space devoted to just moving your computers, and they'll need to take special care of the electronics. A relocation service will pass these costs on to your company.

You can reduce how much space and time a relocation service needs to move your computers by moving files to the cloud. Although you won't be able to reduce how many monitors your company has, you can limit the number of hard drives that are needed by storing files online. If you're able to get rid of enough hard drives to save your commercial mover a significant amount of space and time, they should be willing to pass the savings on to you in the form of a lower price.

Looking at Insurance

By reducing how many hard drives your company needs moved, you'll also be able to save on moving insurance.

While basic moving quotes might include declared value insurance, you might want to purchase an additional full coverage insurance plan. This type of insurance provides comprehensive coverage for all of your company's assets, although the protection comes at a cost. According to HomeAdvisor, an average insurance policy will increase your moving quote by 1.5 percent of the value of your company's insured assets.

Using the above figure, it's easy to see how eliminating a few computers by transitioning to a cloud-based solution could reduce your moving insurance premiums. As an example, assume your business has 100 high-end laptops that cost $1,000 each. All together, these would add $1,500 (100 x $1,000 x 1.5 percent) to your full value insurance quote. If all your employees worked in the cloud, you wouldn't need the computers -- and you could save $1,500 on insuring them.

Transitioning to the cloud while also relocating your company's headquarters may seem like a daunting task. If you can pull it off, though, your business stands to save on IT labor costs, space and time required for the relocation and moving insurance.

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