Scheidydude's Blog

By now you are probably feeling a little overwhelmed by what, at least on the surface, appeared to be a short term project.  But don’t loose focus on the end goal here.  We want to reduce your overall costs associated with maintaining your IT.

So let’s look at some of the benefits I listed for making the move.  On the top of the list is reducing staff.  Everyone thinks of this first, but if you’re like a lot of small businesses, you may only have one person in IT.  Don’t expect to get rid of that single person.  Do expect them to be able to get more done now that they don’t have to handle the maintenance tasks you probably never even know about.  I am speaking from experience here, in the past 40% of my job is completely transparent to the end user.  That same 40% is usually why I’m up at midnight trying not impact the end user.  So if your single IT person is like me, they might not appear to get more work done, but they will look a lot more rested and be a lot more pleasant to work with.

The next three items are directly related.  You will see a reduction in in-house hardware requirements.  This means fewer servers, and fewer network requirements to keep them functioning.  Fewer servers means lower power consumption as well as a lower amount for your property insurance.

Now, here’s one I haven’t mention before.  Moving your resources to the Cloud does not mean simply hosting your servers off-site.  Although this is a possible scenario and a cost savings, it isn’t the best.  When you move to the Cloud you should consider making the move to Cloud Computing.  Cloud Computing is a “pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” (See the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)  definition of Cloud Computing.)   To help clarify this, lets assume you discover that you need another server installed to handle an increase in workload.  In the past you would need to research, order, install, configure and roll-out the necessary hardware and software internally while making sure to allocate power, cooling and physical space appropriately.  With Cloud Computing you log into your providers portal and allocate a virtual resource.  All other physical requirements have been previously prepared for.  So usually within hours, often just a few minutes, your new server is online and handling the increase in workload.  And, once the increase has subsided, you can release that resource back into the Cloud, freeing it up and returning your costs to the level before the increased workload occurred.

This is the most alluring thing about existing in the Cloud.  You can dynamically add and remove resources as your needs change.  In the past, once that resource was on your books, it stayed on your books.

Also, by moving to the Cloud, if some disaster (hurricane, flood, earthquake, fire…or even a simple power outage) were to occur, your IT resources will be off-site and most likely unaffected.  Remote users and clients may not even know you’ve had an issue.

That’s the end of my list of advantages to moving to the Cloud.  There are more, but I’ll stop there.  Hopefully the last one will keep you perky while we look at some of the drawbacks to moving to the Cloud.

Actually, the first one is not really a drawback, but does need to be considered.  People need to be trained.  Your resources, which are now in the Cloud, still need to be managed.  Someone has to know how to add and remove users, how to add and remove virtual servers, and how to setup and restrict access to the resources.  In addition, end users need to know how to access these new resources, be it email, files or applications.  But keep in mind, in the Cloud or not, when technology changes, people still need to be trained.

The last two concerns are vendor related.  No matter which vendor you choose, you will need to consider how these will affect you.  In order to host anything, whether it’s a single page website or gigabytes of email, you will have to enter into a contract with a vendor.  Of course I’ve just stated the obvious.  But what might not be so blaring obvious is the new constraints that you probably don’t face with internal IT.

First is schedules.  Your vendor is also the vendor for countless other clients.  So if they need to make a change (patch, upgrade, replace…) they have to consider how to do so while affecting the least amount of their clients.  If you are affected while a few dozen others are not, they will be apologetic, but that’s how the numbers fall.  However, if you remember that when asking internal IT to do maintenance during off hours you may have received some resistance.  With a vendor, they have already figured out when the best off-hours are and you probably won’t affected at all.

The second item is the contract itself.  Just like any other service contract, it will list what you should and shouldn’t expect.  It will also provide you a way out of the contract if they don’t meet your expectations.  Unfortunately, your expectations may not match what’s in the contract.  Do your research.  Make sure you understand the language and techno-jargon used to define those expectations.

Lastly, and one that affects all the services you get from the Cloud, is bandwidth.  Bandwidth, the speed at which you are connected to the Internet, will affect your service.  Your remote users and clients may see an increase when accessing your Cloud based services.  But the people located in the office where the internal resources used to be will not.  They will experience the same speed your remote users do.  This will be seen as a drawback, probably a large drawback, by those internal and a benefit by those external.  It’s a balancing act.  One that must be managed both physically and mentally.  You should make sure everyone, and I mean everyone, understands what is changing and why.  How the move to the Cloud is a benefit to everyone.