Many people ask whether moving to the cloud will save them money. The honest answer to this is it usually does, but not always – don’t get me wrong, in a lot of cases a move to the cloud provides cost savings, but that is often not the real driver behind the decision. There can be a lot of misunderstanding and mystery surrounding a move to the cloud, for me it is about accessing services on a flexible basis that allow you to react to the changing needs of the business, and avoiding IT becoming a limiting factor in realising company goals and ambition. 

So what does that mean? In the past the time to add new services, to increase the capacity of existing services, as well as the potential cost of adding new hardware to achieve this meant that availability became a barrier to growth and flexibility. The ability to react to growth opportunities, or indeed to scale back where capacity is no longer required can be a game changer for companies.

So what considerations are our customers facing when looking at a cloud strategy?

Hardware investment decisions – when hardware is up for refresh it is an ideal time to look at whether you can save money/increase flexibility by moving to the cloud

Connectivity – is there available bandwidth that is reliable and secure to facilitate access to cloud technologies?

Application suitability – are your core applications ready for a move to the cloud? Are some more suitable than others? What would your migration roadmap look like if you phase your move?

Public versus private cloud – the pace of technology change means that private clouds can easily become defunct or run into performance issues, it can often be as limiting as servers onsite as, you are tied to the decisions made at a moment in time. Public cloud investment from companies like Microsoft means not only migrating to the cloud, but an ongoing cycle of optimisation through advancements in the platform.

Core versus context – choosing to migrate to the cloud with a trusted partner means that you can have your internal staff focus on what is core to your business, rather than managing infrastructure, back-ups etc.

Risk management – a move to the cloud is an ideal time to review your business continuity arrangements, cloud can open up a degree of redundancy that would be impossible to achieve as a single small/medium organisation.

Staff productivity – desktop cloud tools afford staff a greater opportunity to collaborate, offer larger storage capacity and remove the need for inhouse management of servers.

In reality most companies exist in a hybrid environment and as a cloud solution provider, we at INNOVATE work alongside our customers to identify the right decisions to support their business goals. Cloud first but not always cloud is our philosophy. We believe it can be a differentiator for our customers but have the experience to advise when and what to move, and we support the pace at which our clients want to move along that journey.

If you want to talk more about your plans or ask any questions of our team please get in touch.