Businesses and enterprise executives are seriously evaluating the possibilities of moving some or all of their companies’ hardware and/or IT infrastructure to the cloud. There are many benefits from this migration, but in order to be efficient and to reduce possible work place disruptions and downtime, numerous considerations with regards to cloud environments and service delivery need to be contemplated.
First of all, why consider the cloud in the first place?
Many companies are changing platforms and transitioning business critical applications to the cloud to experience a more predictable operations expense model where upgrades and patch management are shouldered by the service provider. Other companies wish to take advantage of cloud solutions to better enable mobile workforces for collaboration and better align access to data, varying band width and storage needs. As well as utilizing the benefits improved disaster recovery and business continuity.
How to get started?
Making the migration to the cloud requires strategic planning by business leaders and their teams. It requires evaluation of both current requirements as well as anticipating future business needs. In addition to IT ‘s perspective, cloud needs must be explored at the department level with the focus of how cloud enables business drivers or fixes business issues. Based on these discussions, a company can determine which applications can move to the cloud and which should stay on-prem. You can also discover which applications will perform best in the cloud.
Here are several discovery questions to help determine cloud solutions for application, compute power, storage and network service needs.
- What applications are critical for your business (in order of priority)? Note what you use on a daily basis.
- How many users access these critical applications daily, weekly, monthly? What is their process? How does it vary by user?
- In the event of an outage, how much downtime can your critical applications and system experience?
- What is your current physical network infrastructure and software?
- How many servers do you have in place? When was your last hardware upgrade?
- What level of security does your business and data require? What level of compliance and regulation must your business adhere to?
- What is your current disaster recovery plan?
- How equipped is your current IT department to manage future IT needs?
- How many employees are working remotely or need to access business data off-site?
- How often have your experienced limitations to your data center or colocation environment?
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Migration to the cloud can be a leap forward in efficient business operations and staff collaboration. To best review your business needs, consult with an agnostic technology agent or consultant to gain a deeper overview of the wide range of solutions and how each one fits in with what you're trying to accomplish. In addition to assisting you with procurement, they can also handle ongoing care.
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About Simplicity
Simplicity VoIP, based in Richmond, VA, provides hosted PBX, VoIP and business telephone solutions nationally to small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses for a comprehensive unified communications experience. Two distinct Class 5 geo-redundant VoIP platforms are offered in addition to fax-to-email, phones and equipment, and managed services. Named as Richmond’s 11th fastest growing company by Richmond BizSense, Simplicity VoIP’s key to success is its on-site service, installation and training supported 24/7/365 by a world-class client services team.