Much has been written and hyped about moving small business infrastructure to “the cloud”. There are applications and workloads that are good candidates for moving to the cloud. There is a general misunderstanding of the term “the cloud.” In general, any service that is moved to the cloud will cost more money than hosting in house. Beware of so-called cloud providers offering ridiculously low pricing. Is your data secure? Is your data backed up? Can others look at the contents of your data? What happens if the cloud provider loses your data, or simply goes out of business? You are also dependent on an Internet connection to access any applications or data that do not reside within your business.
Client services are beginning to develop into a mature market at this time. Like many things Internet related, it’s “buyer beware”.
We can advise you on cloud solutions that complement your business. There are pros and cons for maintaining systems in-house or outsourcing them to a cloud provider.
An anecdote may be helpful when thinking about the cloud.
If you own your own network infrastructure, and you enter a slow business cycle, you can continue to operate.
If you can’t pay the monthly fee to your cloud provider, you are out of business.
Let us help you decide based on facts; not on emotion or pitches from fast talking salesman.