Begin Your Cloud Journey with Today’s Flexibility and Innovation
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, businesses across the country sent their workforces home and quickly learned of limitations within their infrastructure. The companies that had already fully embraced the cloud were slightly ahead of the competition. For everyone else, it became clear they needed to adopt and deploy tools to access data files and collaborate with colleagues anywhere.
If you fall into the “everyone else” bucket, you may know you need to move to the cloud, but not know where to start. It’s time to complete your cloud adoption and create a flexible, resilient work environment.
Why Cloud Now?
When correctly designed and configured, cloud adoption lets users work wherever they’re located. In fact, the best candidates may not be local. Imagine the human capital opportunity if your staff can work from anywhere! Here are just a few more benefits.
Use What You Pay For
Operating cloud-based platforms also means you use more of what you pay for. We’ve found many organizations not leveraging all the features of the cloud-based services they are already buying. Many use Office 365 for email and are not aware of the additional power in the platform, primarily because they worked in the office until now and might not have needed some of the cloud-based features available.
Regularly educate your team on what’s available and adopt new technologies to maximize your return on investment. Your subscription gives you access to a wealth of tools built into the O365 platform from data analytics to internal how-to videos for training staff, so use them.
You Get Enhanced Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
We ask business owners, “How long can you afford to ‘be down’?” Their response: “Never.”
While it’s impossible to have zero downtime, the cloud can get you closer to never. How?
Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. The following numbers show the downtime that will be allowed for a particular percentage of availability, presuming the system is required to operate continuously. Service level agreements (SLA) often refer to monthly downtime or availability in order to calculate service credits to match monthly billing cycles. The numbers show the translation from a given availability percentage to the corresponding amount of time a system would be unavailable.
The SLA level for on-premise environments is 99%. That seems great, until you see the uptime/availability results in the following periods of allowed downtime/unavailability:
- Daily: 14m 24s
- Weekly: 1h 40m 48s
- Monthly: 7h 18m 17s
- Yearly: 3d 15h 39m 29s
The cloud performs at a SLA level of 99.999% uptime/availability and results in the following periods of allowed downtime/unavailability:
- Daily: 0s
- Weekly: 6s
- Monthly: 26s
- Yearly: 5m 15s
You Have Stronger Security
It can be challenging to wrap your head around protecting data or something that exists “in a cloud.”
Historically, businesses have been reluctant to move to the cloud because of unknown security risks. Today, businesses are moving to the cloud to take advantage of layered security within it.
But, adopting the power and flexibility in the cloud does not mean you no longer need a network administrator or a partner like Network Tech. Using data points, like where an employee logged in from or an IP address, your IT service provider can identify security threats and secure them.
Get Started with the Cloud
It’s important to know the cloud may not offer cost savings. It won’t be cheaper in most instances, but it will give you a consistent, predictable spend and you will experience fewer surprises. You pay a per-user, per-month price.
Watch our short video about the benefits of cloud computing
Not having to come up with the entire IT budget at once can help you steady cash flow. And, as a bonus, you’ll get access to new tools, strategies and features that are regularly released to enhance user experience and improve security.
Before you start moving data to the cloud, sit down with your managed services provider (MSP). Decide what you’re going to move, when you’re going to do it and where data will go. How will it be protected at rest, in transit and while being processed? This includes things like:
- OneDrive
- SharePoint
- Data accessibility
- File\folder permission structure
Your MSP will ensure that everything is set up correctly, giving the right permissions and accessibility to the right people.
You need an IT advocate who can advise you on the best cloud migration strategy for your needs. Contact us today to set up a time to discuss how we can help you harness the powers of the cloud.