By Amol Dalvi, Vice President of Product, Nerdio.
In the modern accounting landscape, infrastructure is no longer just an IT concern, it’s a business performance lever. As firms grow their client base, support remote teams, and adapt to hybrid work, the ability to scale backend systems efficiently becomes critical. But outdated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) models are creating cost and operational hurdles that firms can no longer afford to ignore.
Firms relying on fixed-capacity environments and manual provisioning often find themselves grappling with rising infrastructure expenses, underutilized resources, and stretched IT teams. This creates a drag on margins, limits growth, and hinders service delivery.
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The Cost of Scaling Without Automation
Consider the case of Sage, a global accounting software provider serving over 3 million customers. As it expanded into new regions, onboarding just 40 users meant hiring another IT engineer to manage infrastructure. That approach didn’t scale. The firm’s ability to grow was directly tied to increasing headcount, turning infrastructure management into a financial bottleneck.
This challenge is common among accounting firms with legacy systems. IT staff are tasked with manually managing virtual machines (VMs), anticipating user demand, and troubleshooting outages. These are efforts that become increasingly complex across multiple offices, time zones, and busy tax seasons.
Real-Time Automation: A Smarter Path Forward
Today, firms are turning to policy-based infrastructure automation that reacts to real-time usage. Rather than relying on static schedules, these platforms automatically start or stop VMs based on actual demand. Systems self-heal from failures and adjust capacity according to business hours or seasonal workloads, all without manual oversight.
Sage’s move to an automated platform helped reduce its VM infrastructure costs by more than 60%. In just one month, they saved $123,000 through auto-scaling. Over the course of a year, that translated into $1.5 million in savings, all while maintaining strong system performance and reliability.
Scaling Without Adding Headcount
Perhaps the most telling result was operational: Sage grew from 200 to 1,000 customers without hiring a single additional infrastructure staff member. Instead of spending time on day-to-day system maintenance, engineers were able to focus on higher-value projects, such as improving automation elsewhere in the organization.
This kind of operational agility is essential in accounting. Between seasonal client spikes, new compliance requirements, and the need for service innovation, firms must be able to scale up (or down) quickly, without growing overhead.
How to Get Started: Practical Steps for Firms
The good news is accounting firms don’t need to start from scratch. Automation can be added to existing cloud or VDI environments for quick wins and lasting impact. Here’s how to get started:
- Begin with visibility. Accurate, real-time usage data is the foundation for smart automation. Without it, systems can’t scale efficiently or respond effectively to change.
- Prioritize high-impact automation. Focus on automating full provisioning, scaling, and recovery workflows, not just small tasks. The goal is to reduce manual effort at scale.
- Build in resilience. Systems should include self-healing capabilities. Downtime is expensive, automation can minimize disruption and preserve business continuity.
- Maintain transparency. Policy-based automation gives CFOs and IT leaders clear oversight and control, an important factor in highly regulated industries like finance.
- Start small and iterate. There’s no need to overhaul your infrastructure in one go. Begin with a pilot, demonstrate cost and time savings, and expand from there.
Automation as a Strategic Financial Lever
With growing pressure to improve margins, control costs, and remain agile, accounting leaders must look beyond traditional IT models. Infrastructure automation isn’t just a technical upgrade, it’s a strategic tool that allows firms to scale smarter, reduce operational risk, and reinvest time and resources into client service and innovation.
By adopting automation that aligns infrastructure performance with business needs in real-time, firms can finally break free from the legacy cost-growth cycle. Instead, they gain an infrastructure that’s responsive, efficient, and built for modern accounting.
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Amol is a software product executive and VP of Product at Nerdio, with 15+ years leading engineering teams and 9+ years growing a successful software startup to 20+ employees. A 3x startup founder and angel investor, with deep expertise in Microsoft full stack development, cloud, and SaaS. Patent holder, Certified Scrum Master, and agile product leader.
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Tags: Automation, efficiency, it costs, Technology
