Have A Plan When You Dive Into The Cloud
2016 is the year of the cloud. We finally moved to a situation where the majority of businesses were using the technology, even if they didn’t realize it. But here’s the rub. There’s a lot of talk about the amazing benefits that the cloud brings to businesses and their bottom lines. But there’s not an awful lot of discussion about how exactly businesses should get there. Transitioning to the cloud is not an easy process. It requires careful planning and diligence. Let’s take a look at what you should be doing to move over to the cloud as quickly and as easily as possible.
Keep A Check On Maintenance Times
When you have control over your IT systems, you control when maintenance takes place. Maintenance is usually scheduled from late on Friday night to early Monday morning, to avoid clashing with your business. But in the cloud, you don’t have direct control over the times when maintenance is carried out. As a result, your systems could go down at a critical time, sabotaging your business. Good cloud providers should be able to tell you exactly when systems will be down and when they will carry out maintenance. This will help you plan your business processes accordingly. Make sure you schedule tasks for these slots that don’t require cloud computing, like meetings or other local PC projects.
Investigate Hybrid Cloud Solutions
For many companies, downtime simply isn’t an option. Thus, cloud solutions don’t provide an adequate solution for their purposes. Hybrid cloud integration solutions can solve this problem. According to a study by RightScale, 82 percent of firms rely on a combination of cloud and local computing. This allows businesses to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, as well as the benefits of local computing.
According to researchers, firms receive two big benefits. First, companies are able to share files they want on cloud servers, making it easy to collaborate and work with colleagues. And second, they’re able to keep files they don’t want to share on local servers. This helps maintain their data integrity and prevent it from being widely dispersed. As a result, hybrid solutions are a great way for firms new to cloud computing to test the waters.
Investigate The Risks To Your Business’s Organizational Change
No change in business comes without a degree of risk. And the cloud can present significant risks if appropriate measures aren’t taken. The solution to this is to call experts from across your company to a corporate risk board. You should make sure that you have somebody present who understands and can explain the benefits of the technology. And you should also have finance experts who are able to run through some of the numbers and know the costs. The meeting should then investigate ways in which the company can reduce risks. This means that each department outlines its plans and communicates how it will benefit the company. IT professionals also need to be clear about potential hazards, such as the risk of a data breach.
