Moving to the cloud can be a game changing decision for businesses looking to scale up their services and capacity, while containing costs. Platforms such as Microsoft Azure provide a foundation for businesses looking to transform in the cloud - combining application suites such as Office 365, enterprise security tools, vendor agnostic integrations, and more. But many companies are still reluctant to begin their cloud migrations, anticipating an all-or-nothing process with limited impact. Fortunately, that isn't the case at all.
You still have total control over technology, but your IT department won’t have to worry about constant updates. When you move to the cloud, time spent maintaining hardware and upgrading software is significantly reduced— eliminating headaches with it. Now your IT team can focus on advancing your organization’s technology, rather than being a repair service. Plus, you will have more time to spend improving operations and launching agile initiatives. Instead of spending more and more portions of your budget on servers for email storage and workloads, you can think strategically and support organizational managers in a much more agile fashion, quickly responding to their needs.
You can move to the cloud at your own pace, or use a hybrid approach. While some early cloud supporters advocated for moving your entire organization to the cloud all at once, this isn’t a process that needs to happen overnight. Most implementations start with a hybrid approach—moving a single workload, like email, and growing from there. The hybrid cloud creates a consistent platform that spans data centers and the cloud, simplifying IT and delivering apps and data to users on virtually any device, anywhere.
It gives you control to deliver the computing power and capabilities that your organization demands and to scale up or down as needed without wasting your onsite technology investments. As many organizations move their productivity workloads to the cloud, the path for each workload is different, and the time it takes for those migrations varies. Consultants can help you move workloads such as file sync-and-share or email first, and then help you figure out the right long-term plan for more difficult or larger projects.
With automatic updates, you don’t have to worry about email downtime. When you move your organization’s email to the cloud, you can rest easy knowing that the experts who created the software are taking care of the maintenance and updates. Your IT team no longer needs to worry about installing updates, and can instead focus on bigger IT needs. Software updates and fixes are delivered automatically as soon as they are released. For more information about migrating your business to the cloud, reach out to iCorps for a free consultation.