More and more businesses are moving to the cloud to increase their flexibility, reduce costs and better meet customer expectations. This chiefly involves moving their IT solutions, servers, documents and data storage to a cloud environment. But such a decision is easier for some businesses than it is for others. If you are still trying to decide whether moving to the cloud is right for your organisation, read on.
There are many benefits of moving to the cloud. Here are some of the major ones:
Let’s look at some common business problems that can be solved by moving to the cloud.
By moving to the cloud, you can effectively replace an on-premises IT Capex model with an Opex model and reduce your IT overheads significantly. These savings can then be added to other areas of the business – to be used as a hefty chunk of cashflow to your budget, to hire more staff, or to be stored as savings. The cloud also enables a scalable infrastructure, so you can expand or contract your IT investment depending on the size and needs of your business.
When organisations experience quick growth, their on-premises IT setup may struggle to keep pace. If you need a new server built to handle a higher workload, there can often be a long wait. And as your server environment grows, so too does the cost of maintaining it. This can lead to missed opportunities, employee frustration and, ultimately, lost revenue.
By moving to the cloud, you can increase your server capability immediately and give your employees the means to meet the demands of your market and other important business outcomes.
The faster speed of business, quicker time to market and higher customer expectations are all new challenges for every organisation. Traditional on-premises IT solutions are simply too slow to allow your employees to meet these challenges head-on. In the cloud, however, you don’t have to wait around for new product releases and updates. It’s all available immediately. Microsoft’s tools like Office 365 and Microsoft 365 are always the latest and greatest, so you can be sure your employees are working with cutting edge technology, giving them the means to get their work done efficiently.
When your servers, systems and data are all held on-premises it can restrict your employees from getting their work done anywhere outside of the office and regular office hours. Today, however, the top talent wants more flexibility to do their jobs. Or, for example, your sales team need to access important files and run specific business processes like document signing and CRM processing out on the road to help them close more efficiently.
With Office 365 and the flexibility of the cloud, business processes can not only be made more efficient, they can be done from anywhere on any device.
The business landscape is changing and moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud has become something of a ‘must-have’. Organisations who continue to hesitate on a move to a more digitally sophisticated IT environment, risk losing out to their more tech-savvy competitors.
However, while the above benefits and solutions to business problems may seem like the perfect solution, it’s not as simple as ‘switching on’ the cloud and watching the savings roll in and the productivity levels hit the roof. Changing anything in your business – especially something as fundamental as your IT environment – and how your employees work can be a much bigger, riskier job than it looks.
That’s why you need the right IT partner to help you make the move to the cloud safely, quickly and in a way that allows your organisation to hit the ground running and keep your business growing.
At Centrality, the cloud is what we do. We’re a Gold-certified Microsoft Partner for Cloud Platform & Productivity, and our team of Azure experts can make sure you can work in a cloud environment perfectly suited to your business. For over two decades we have been helping our customers deploy and harness cutting-edge IT solutions, so we know what works and what doesn’t.
From our first contact, we set out to understand your business’s specific goals, outcomes and values. Then we go about crafting the perfect IT environment and solutions to meet your requirements.
We are interested in driving your businesses forward using the power of the cloud – not simply selling IT licenses. That’s why as well as helping to get your business into the cloud, we also offer an end-to-end service focused on digital transformation. That includes: planning, design, migration, user adoption and on-going support.
Every one of our customers has different requirements, and it’s our job to find the approach that will suit you best. Choosing the right cloud platform, what to migrate and where to start can be difficult. Choosing the right IT partner shouldn’t be.
For more on the benefits of the cloud, go to our page on Azure and the Intelligent Cloud.
To find out about how the Microsoft cloud can solve problems for your business and why you can depend on our IT services, get in touch with us today.