Making the Cloud work for you

Does my organization need this?

Cloud Computing is here -- and it needs to be deployed in a responsible manner.

The market can be very confusing as it seems everyone offers some sort of cloud solution, be it phones, conferencing, storage and more. Zoom came to the forefront of the global marketplace during the COVID-19 experience. Fast forward and now Zoom offers business phone service that is applying pressure to many other players in the business communications space.

Why it matters

Technology is moving faster than ever but making wise investment choices never goes out of style.

What does it look like?

A rational approach to moving to the cloud looks like this:

Microsoft Office 365 with all the features. This gives you best in class Email, Calendar, Storage and familiar Office Applications such as MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint and more. 

Sharepoint and OneDrive for online storage and data organization.

If your organization does not have any "server-based" applications, we are increasingly seeing Microsoft InTune being leveraged for management of users and devices.

Cloud managed End Point Protection and Encryption for your laptops.

Cloud managed WiFi devices.

Local file and database servers as required for line-of-business applicatins. These servers can be deployed in one of three manners:

1. In your office. This makes sense when you have a non-trivial number of users, really large files such as CAD artwork, marketing graphics etc. If your power and internet service are very stable and your business is not particularly sensitive to extreme weather. e.g. you're not in south Florida
2. If you have marginal power and internet service, consider moving your application, file and database servers to a co-location data center. You enjoy the benefits of ownership of the equipment to lower your overall costs, but leverage the availability of the co-location datacenter.
3. If your applications have rapid scaling (think Netflix servers on a Friday night), you can benefit by utility-scale computing. Paying for "application servers" to host a software vendor's application in the cloud is rarely cost effective.

This one definitely falls into the "it depends". This is where your navitend Account Manager can assist you in making prudent decisions for your current and upcoming needs during our flightplan service.

What does the investment look like?

Cloud investments are typically in the form of monthly charges for committed, or allocated, resources and sometimes also pay-as-you-go for resources consumed such as the amount of data transferred, stored, etc.

Paying as you go results in higher marginal rates, while committing to a level of resource consumption (or availability) reduces the marginal price.