I spent many years in commercial IT teams where a large portion of time was spent keeping servers working, backing up, restoring, enabling and disabling user access to resources and a myriad of other tasks related to on-premises infrastructure.
On-premises resources have benefits and can be great if you have the people to manage them. But more and more businesses are looking to streamline support teams which can often mean cutbacks on staff who are available to manage servers, applications and databases in the office.
Not only does hosting your own equipment create human resource difficulties, but there is also the cost relating to deterioration. Specifically talking about servers, there comes a time when that "top of the line" server you bought six years ago just does not cope with the load being put on it.
Businesses should now be seriously considering moving their critical services into the cloud. Not only can it save money, but it will often to faster for you and your customers to access your information when it is hosted in the cloud. I know that sounds strange, but networks can handle requests in a very clever way when that information is hosted in the cloud. Instead of everyone going off to the source and getting a separate instance of a document or some data, caching can mean that once a person requests some content, the next request for that same content can be done much, much faster.
What does it mean to "move into the cloud"?
You don't need a "Mary Poppins" umbrella to float up into the ether. I am talking about relocating specific servers, services and applications to the internet instead of running them locally in the office. This means that the physical location of these items is outside your office. And it is not a daunting task either because cloud providers often have easy-to-use migration tools to help you do it.
If I move to the cloud, I don't have control of my intellectual property and my competitors can see my sales figures
Business Owner
This really is not true. When you choose a reliable and trustworthy cloud provider, you can given assurances that your critical and private information is kept as secure as possible. Yes, there is always the small chance that a Russian hacker could access your sensitive data, but there is also that chance when you have it locally on your premises. The difference is that when your information is stored in the cloud, you have global experts managing security to keep it safe. These experts know their stuff and charge large amounts of money for their time - time which the cloud provider pays for ... not you!
Who are the cloud providers out there?
Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon's AWS have pay-as-you-go pricing models which help to reduce infrastructure costs and can be amortised to help your balance sheet reconcile when the accountant walks in the door.
As I mentioned earlier, they often have migration tools to help you get your information off your local server and into their system.
I support moving services to the cloud, but I also suggest that you be sensible about it. It's often not feasible to throw all of your servers out of the 15th floor window. Most businesses employ a "hybrid" approach where some services are in the cloud and others stay in the office. This approach will generally save you money and also allows you to "try out" a cloud solution before jumping in too far.
If you have any questions about moving to the cloud or which cloud providers to try, just give me a call and we can discuss your options.