So you might recall the nursery rhyme "Rain rain go away come again another day."
Well some people take this even further and they would say the same of clouds
well not traditional clouds but cloud computing. Well let's discuss that
because I'm not sure that there's complete wisdom in that approach so
let's look at the pros and cons as they might relate to your organization.
So first what are the benefits of cloud computing
why would anybody want to change what they've got and go to the cloud. Well
first up it provides access to really the latest and greatest technology
almost at an instant, generally very easy to get up and running with also once
you've got access to this new technology its scalable so if you need more
capability or less capability that's available a touch of a button. If your
organization is growing, shrinking usually you've got a lot of flexibility
there with cloud computing to pay for what you need rather than buying
something that might be fixed for a period of years which is the case when
you're buying your own service. Other things, well usually better collaboration
when you're working in a cloud-based world and the ability for people to work
from anywhere so while that's not always a necessity, usually most of us like that
flexibility of being able to do work from places other than our standard
workplace. Looking at CyberSecurity that's also an area we're now starting
to see much better capabilities often from cloud environments than certainly
what small organisations would have access to themselves with just their own
on-premises systems and then of course there's a sustainability aspect of cloud
as well. So, are there downsides? well there's always a downside
to consider. Not so many in the cloud world and as more time goes on those
downsides are shrinking and reducing and being addressed. One that we've come
across is often out of the box some cloud systems just their standard
offerings might not give you as much flexibility around backups and how you
would retain information if it got deleted say a year or two years ago- how
do you address that in a cloud if your cloud system doesn't give you an ability
to roll back that fast certainly something to to think about but in a lot
of cases there are ways of catering to that. Another area to think about is your
internet performance, that certainly plays in to how well cloud will work for
you in locations such as New Zealand for instance there is really really good
performance in most business locations with access to gigabit internet speeds
for very low cost. Pther parts of the world maybe not as good but often that
isn't a huge inhibitor. So really it's well worth considering cloud, so where
should you start if your organization isn't really using cloud technologies
today? The first place I would recommend looking is at your email system if
you've got an email server that's on your premises then in most organizations
these days it make sense to get rid of that, go to the cloud, take advantage of
the advanced capabilities, the latest features, the fact that it's replicated
across numerous locations and backed up for you that's something really worth
paying for so that's it from me if you'd like to dive in further on this
discussion feel free to join my email updates PaulSpain.com/updates or
reach out to me here on social media or you can always email me directly if
you'd like immediate help around this subject and some input