Everybody is talking about moving their business to the cloud. The primary attractions are cutting infrastructure and management costs, squeezing more out of your IT budget, and added functionality.
Should you join the cloud crowd? Quite possibly, but before you do, remember the following:
The Cloud Is Someone Else’s Computer
If you are hosting your data in the cloud, you are essentially entrusting someone else to manage your data.
Pro: A small business now can afford a professional data center with top-notch security, climate control, near-perfect uptime, and certified staff to manage its hardware, software, and network equipment.
Con: Not all clouds are equal. 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. You might end up with an unreliable cloud hosting service.
Before you choose a cloud hosting service, you need to understand what service level agreement you have, how emergencies are handled, and make sure you are getting the computing resources you need.
In other words, do your due diligence.
Cloud Migrations Can Be Disruptive
Migrating your infrastructure to the cloud can be fairly straightforward or could require a lot of time and labor. When tempted by a low monthly price, examine the initial costs to move the data, configure the environment, train your users, and make tweaks.
That migration time doesn’t mean you don’t have access to your data, but the transition could be inconvenient and cost time and money.
Get It Done Right
Today, most businesses can benefit from some degree of cloud computing, from simple hosted email and document management to moving most of your infrastructure to a hosted environment.
However, when a cloud implementation isn’t planned out properly it can be a disaster.
Want to talk to one of our experts about the cloud? Give Quikteks a call at (973) 882-4644. We can help.