We hear a lot about the benefits of moving your business to the cloud. It can reduce that big expense on new infrastructure and the ongoing management costs. The cloud can increase the effectiveness of your IT budget. It can add functionality and increase user satisfaction.
Businesses are rapidly moving all or portions of their IT to the cloud, and for a lot of good reasons. However, we say don’t migrate to the cloud unless you consider this. It is important to remember the following:
The Cloud Is Someone Else’s Computer
Depending on how you look at it, this is either a pro or a con. If you are hosting your data in the cloud, you are essentially entrusting someone else to manage your data. That might mean that the data is in better hands – a professional data center with top-notch security, climate control, near-perfect uptime, and certified staff to manage the hardware, software, and network equipment is usually a big step up from most small business management.
That said, anyone can sell cloud storage. Anyone can lease out a portion of a data center or keep a shared server on their premise and sell you cloud computing resources from it.
Before you pull the trigger, you’ll want to understand what kinds of SLAs (service level agreement) you have, how emergencies are handled, and make sure you are getting the computing resources you need. If looking for a secure set up with the cloud, go to our enterprise solutions page.
Cloud Migrations Can Be Disruptive
Migrating your infrastructure to the cloud could be a fairly straightforward process, or it could require a lot of time and labor. Don’t get fooled by the low monthly price – there will often be some legwork to move the data, configure the environment, train your users, and make tweaks. There can also be many hidden costs.
That migration time doesn’t mean you don’t have access to your data, but the transition could take time, and anytime users need to change their regular everyday processes, it can slow things down.
When Done Right, It’s Worth It
Today, most businesses can benefit from at least some degree of cloud computing, whether it be some basics like hosted email and document management (like G Suite or Office 365), data backups, or a line-of-business app, to moving most of your infrastructure to a hosted environment. Especially given what we are dealing with today, with employees in different locations and working remotely.
The problem most businesses run into is when a cloud implementation isn’t planned out properly or is handled poorly.
We’d love to talk to you about the cloud, help get your company set up for success, and keep your data secure. Give Symmetric IT Group a call at (813) 749-0895 and set up an appointment!
