Migrating your business communications to the cloud gives you fast, easy and effective access to your data and information. And while your business will save money and have less downtime, it can be confusing to know how it works. Put simply, the cloud is a number of servers in data centres that your business can use for data and information storage and software applications. These can include project management tools, email platforms and customer relationship management software.
Your business bottom line will thank you after you migrate to the cloud as you only pay for the resource usage you require. This gives you ease of scalability and the ability for your team to work remotely, at different locations or from home. When you have an effective cloud migration strategy, migrating to the cloud is simpler than you think.
The obvious benefits of migrating to the cloud include lower costs, availability, reliability, better disaster recovery and improved analytics. But there are other benefits to your business after you have migrated to the cloud.
1: Ease of workplace mobility for your team
When your business uses cloud based communications systems, your team’s productivity and efficiency will increase. They will be able to access data and information applications in the cloud remotely, from home or overseas via any connected device.
2: Improved IT resources management
Migrating your business to the cloud will free up your IT team’s time and allow them to focus on their primary role of contributing to projects that add value to the bottom line. When your business uses the cloud, your IT team won’t have to spend time maintaining serves, troubleshooting faulty applications or installing updates.
3: Reduced carbon footprint
Have you ever considered how much energy onsite servers and offsite disaster recovery systems use? When your business uses the cloud, your server capacity easily scales to suit your current needs. Opening up new locations or scaling back to just one gets a whole lot easier when you use the cloud.
What steps you need to take to migrate to the cloud
Your cloud migration timeline needs to take into account several factors including how much IT function you want to migrate to the cloud and over what period of time. Arrow’s expert cloud migration team can handle all aspects of migrating to the cloud. To ensure the best migration outcomes we suggest you use the following steps.
Step 1 to migrate to the cloud: Consider your business strategy
Having a detailed understanding of your financial and business drivers will help you get the best outcome. It is important to know what your business and IT goals are including your capital expenditure (CapEx) versus operating expenditure (OpEx) needs. Choosing a cloud provider that allows you ease of availability will keep your business agile and competitive.
Step 2 to migrate to the cloud: Evaluate your current applications
Before migrating to the cloud, it is important to identify any constraints of your current applications. Some applications may have legacy and/or compatibility issues, which may make need to be reconfigured before you migrate to the cloud.
Step 3 to migrate to the cloud: Analyse and evaluate your business processes
When your business migrates to the cloud there will be an impact on business processes. Determining which processes may be affected by operating technologies or legacy infrastructure can result in increased efficiencies after cloud migration.
Step 4 to migrate to the cloud: Choosing the right cloud provider
Over the past few years there has been a rapid growth in the number of companies providing cloud migration services. Before choosing one it is important to consider the following:
- How much experience they have with similar sized businesses
- Whether they are Australian based with access to 24/7, 365 days a year support
- How much technical and hands on operational expertise they have
- What happens during the migration process and how smooth will it be for your business.
Arrow can smoothly migrate your business communications to the cloud so you get:
- Virtual updates for all your communications
- Reduced IT costs with less complicated infrastructure
- Your data, video, voice and information safe with disaster recovery and cloud-hosted redundancies.
What are the most popular cloud options?
When it comes to choosing the right cloud service option for your business, it’s important to look at what the provider offers and how they best match your business needs. We suggest you consider scalability, database size and capacity demands. When you assess the costs of cloud computing, be sure to look for hidden charges for bandwidth, API calls, geographical location and messages sent. Arrow’s expert cloud computing solution team can help you choose the right cloud computing option for your business.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in 2006 and offers a mix of platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. The broad IT infrastructure services AWS provides include storage options, computing power and networking and databases. AWS has over 50 services that are easy to access with just a few clicks of your mouse. And if your business requirements change, AWS easily scales without upfront capital expenses.
Some of AWS services include the following:
- Compute: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers virtual servers with varying capacities and sizes. Amazon EC2 Container Service and EC2 Container Registry allows you to use images and work with Docker containers on the AWS platform.
- Storage: Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) offers scalable object storage for analytics, archives and data backup. Amazon Elastic File System provides managed cloud based file storage while Amazon Elastic Block Store offers block level storage to use with EC2.
- Data management and databases: Amazon Relational Database Service has options for SQL Server, Oracle, My SQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and Amazon Aurora. Amazon DynamoDB manages NoSQL databases.
- Migration, hybrid cloud: AWS Migration Hub and EC2 Systems are some of the various tools to help your business migrate databases, servers, applications and data onto the AWS public cloud.
Microsoft Azure is another cloud option that gives your business the freedom to manage, build and deploy applications on a global network with your preferred frameworks and tools. The hundreds of different services Microsoft Azure provides include databases, file storage, services for mobile and web apps and full virtual machines. Microsoft Azure allows your business to easily add cloud capabilities to your existing network via its platform as a service (PaaS) model. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is also available.
Some of Microsoft Azure services include the following:
- SQL databases: Through managed SQL databases that easily scale, your business saves money on software, hardware and IT expertise.
- Virtual machines: Azure allows you to quickly create Linux or Microsoft virtual machines (VMs) in a matter of minutes. These VMs are cloud based and host services and apps as if they were in your own data centre.
- Azure Active Directory Domain services: Using the same technology as Windows Active Directory this service allows you to remotely manage and move security structures and authentication.
- Visual Studio team services: This add on service offers a complete application lifecycle management (ALM) solution in the Microsoft cloud. Your developers can track and share code changes, perform load testing, and deliver applications to production while collaborating in Azure from all over the world.
The best Australian cloud migration team
Arrow’s Cloud Solutions help your business plug into the cloud with confidence. Our expert cloud migration team makes cloud migration simple. They handle it all including:
- Solution design
- Implementation
- Ongoing maintenance and support
You also get a dedicated Account Manager with 100% Australian support 24/7, 365 days a year. Find out how migrating your business to the cloud is simpler than you think.
