What are we talking about here?
Migrating IT applications and services to the Cloud is the process by which a business moves the physical location of services, applications and data which has historically been hosted onsite or on-premises to a 3rd party provider such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This process can include either all or only some of your services such as email, telephone service, data storage, backup processes, disaster recovery and more. Cloud providers are similar in that they provide the physical security, hardware and network connectivity and many associated legal requirements and compliancies to the environment and your business can either manage the rest or even deploy managed services where nearly all management of that application or service is handled by the provider.
Moving email to the Cloud is highly recommended. Many would say running Microsoft Exchange on-premises today makes a company a sitting duck for hackers, data loss or even worse. When you migrate your email to the Cloud using Microsoft Exchange Online or Google Workspace you remove the necessity to manage the security and availability of the email servers and environment. The process of moving large volumes of users and their associated mailboxes can be tricky and may lead to downtime and dataloss if not done properly. B-Comp Services has assisted countless organizations migrate their email to the cloud.
Because of the economies of scale Cloud providers offer opportunities which would be out of reach financially for most organizations. As a result, nearly all businesses can benefit from migrating to the Cloud. Some other examples of migration opportunities include migrating backup processes from tape to the Cloud or enabling a disaster recovery environment which mirrors your on-premises network to the Cloud in case of emergency.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
With on-premises computing you are often required to purchase and provision equipment with the lifetime of the hardware and/or software in mind. With the Cloud you pay only for what you use and can easily scale an environment to increase or decrease capacity when and as needed. A business is not required to procure or manage the equipment over its lifetime and this capability is available at a lower cost because you only pay for what you use.
Security and the capability to adequately monitor your environment is easily enabled in the Cloud and alternatively quite expensive when done properly on-premises. Similarly, running complete disaster recovery drills which assist with the creation of a playbook or process to recover from failure are not financially feasible on-premises for many business due to cost. Operating in the Cloud most certainly can help a business reduce the time it takes to recover from disaster as well as reduce, if not eliminate, any data loss incurred as a result of that disaster.
In addition to the increased availability, resiliency, durability and scalability of the resources you host in the Cloud, your company benefits from nearly ubiquitous access for any user from any location from any device. A company can migrate file storage and even their entire workstation to the Cloud. Even Hollywood is migrating the development of visual effects using workstations in the Cloud which is made possible by new advancements in streaming protocols which enable fast screen refresh over the Internet.
Complete Cloud Migration and Management Services
B-Comp Services offers complete Cloud Migration and Management Services and accordingly can help your business migrate to the Cloud. But once you have migrated to the Cloud the work is not complete.
No longer can a system be designed with security as an afterthought. Security is nearly always the number one priority and the application of security should not be considered only after the solution is implemented. With that in mind, security is an ongoing concern and it is essential continuous monitoring is managed. Baselines need to be established, logs reviewed and metrics analyzed. Disaster recovery playbooks must be created and importantly tested.
Obviously there are ongoing opportunities for optimization. While speed and availability can always be optimized, one often overlooked optimization a business can implement relates to ongoing cost management. Frequent review of your entire environment is necessary in order for the monthly spend to not get out of control.
Cloud migration and management is our core competency and what we hear is the #1 reason why businesses chose B-Comp Services.
