By Mark Fincham, Chief Technical Partner
Last week you heard from Nils Solvang our Managing Partner here at CloudCIO, who introduced our new blog, where we discuss Cloudification pros & cons and our top tips for the migration of business IT to the Cloud. If you missed Nils’ introductory post, read it here. Otherwise, read on, to discover the first of our Cloudify top tips, and follow us over the next few weeks to complete the series.
CloudCIO have performed a number of cloud migrations for businesses, using both the Microsoft and Google platforms. If you are thinking of embarking on a migration to the cloud yourself, why not have a look at our Top Tips from professionals who have experienced some of the challenges therein.
We assume you have decided to cloudify, have a clear view of what business benefits you want to harvest from your cloudification and have taken our advice, to begin with your Office environment.
Choose your cloud services vendor carefully.
The two main players in this arena are Microsoft and Google. In general, for businesses that are either, already predominantly Gmail users, or possibly heavy users of MS Office tools, this decision may be straight forwards. However, making the choice between these two vendors is not always as obvious as it may first seem since both vendors have strengths and weaknesses across their Office service product offerings. The significance of this may only become apparent after closer scrutiny of your Office related business activities and data. If your hand has been forced by an existing IT application supplier who has cloudified their service, you may need to consider which office environment their product integrates best with.
One of the benefits of Cloud computing is the speed with which vendors can bring patches, upgrades, fixes and new products to market. It is therefore important that you have an appreciation of each vendor’s current product offerings (also their strengths and weaknesses) and each vendor’s roadmap. A short workshop with an external advisor could be very beneficial at this stage.
This is a crucial decision, make sure you take the time to do the research, maybe including a small pilot before a big roll-out. Both the big vendors provide free trials of their cloud offerings so make good use of this opportunity, to validate which technology best fits your requirements. Cloudification of the basics will typically form a platform for new business improvements like enhanced collaboration for example, so also consider what is next and how your chosen platform enables your next move.
For informal discussion on Cloud Migration in particular contact CloudCIO