It’s a big buzz word and therefore lots of companies are asking themselves ‘should we move to the cloud?’. The problem is, they are not sure where to start and what it really means for them.
We have lots of conversations with people every day about what ‘cloud working’ and ‘cloud systems’ are. It’s a big topic and the answer is multi-faceted depending on what a business needs and does.
What systems do you have?
How do you gain access to your systems and what do you share within your team and how?
Do you have multiple offices/locations or home/remote workers?
What data are you backing up and how?
What are you spending on your current IT set up?
As a concept, the cloud has been around for a long time. Email’s are probably the easiest example of data being kept and accessed from an online (cloud) location.
You receive or send an email and you choose where you see the email. You can view it on your computer, laptop, mobile or tablet. What you’re doing is accessing the email from the cloud and downloading or uploading the data. We all do this daily without really thinking about it being hosted in the cloud.
For a business, you could host your systems in the cloud, backup to the cloud. It all depends largely on your business and your set up.
If you are considering changing your current set up, we can advise you on the best options for your business.
Cloud based infrastructures lend themselves to business with lots of sites, mobile workers or business growing rapidly and need flexibility. Cloud based systems give you more control, speed of change and security.
As with everything ‘cloud’ there are lots of options. There are solutions like Office 365, OneDrive, and Microsoft Azure. There is much to think about and we can debunk it all for you.
Whether all or part of your business should be moved to the cloud is something that we can explore with you. We can do a full system review for you.
We will work with you to compare all the options available to you. You need to fully understand all the costs of ownership with an on-site IT solution, compared to an online solution. As well as how they stack up against each other in terms of disaster recovery, security, software updates, flexibility, control etc. It will all come down to how your business works and how you want to move forward.