Organisations should never underestimate the undertaking of moving to the cloud – it’s much more difficult than many assume but get it right and it really is a game changer for your business.
One thing that is important is that you don’t allow cost savings to drive decisions – it’s the cost of innovation that is critical. There is no doubt that migrating to the cloud could save your business money but that’s barely scratching the surface of how the cloud can impact an organisation.
What is important to remember is that innovation of any kind can have its difficulties and it’s not always a straight road ahead, and it’s often difficult to predict exactly when and how you’ll get there. Developers need the space and freedom to go down some roads that don’t end up leading anywhere.
However, where as in the old days failure used to end up costing your business lots of money, this is no longer the case. With cloud instances, open-source software and open APIs, it’s never been so cost effective to experiment. The biggest hurdle isn’t resource; it’s company culture.
For a successful migration for your business you need to move your philosophy towards a DevOps culture, faster deployments and easier scaling. This means if software doesn’t scale in a data centre, it won’t scale in the cloud. Simply moving an IT stack to the cloud does not provide the virtues of the cloud. Yes, there are lots of virtual machines where you can spin up instances, but will the software stack be able to take advantage of all of this lovely new compute and storage resource?
For example, relational databases were designed for a time when scaling meant you bought bigger machines. They were never designed for scaling out across many machines. It doesn’t matter how many instances you can throw it, without some really serious application engineering, you’ll never take advantage of them.
Lastly, for most businesses, the cloud is more secure than they could ever hope it to be. The danger comes from the prospect of shadow IT, or its cloud equivalent. Sprawling systems that are built on top of each other, all interconnected in bewildering ways. In order to deal with this businesses need a crack operations team with great tools.
For more information and free expert advice about how “Cloud Computing” can work for you and your business, please give us a call on 0345 389 2310 or send us an enquiry online by clicking here. Alternatively you can download our telephone systems buyers’ guide as useful reference material or even run a quick quote to obtain a budget cost for a new telephone system in less than 60 seconds by clicking here.
