All Cloud No Magic: Migrating to the Cloud with intY

For some of your customers, it is evident that changes are necessary to save money and protect the bottom line, avoid staff redundancies or furloughs, reposition the business to allow more flexible and efficient working for staff, and ensure that all safety can be maintained. These lofty goals used to be escorted with the myth that with technology, you can’t have availability, security, ease of use and scalability all in one offering. To this intY has one simple answer, SaaS (Software as a Service).

The world of SaaS is growing hourly with big players making tremendous headway in changing the way small, medium and large scale enterprises communicate, do work, and store information. The biggest service being used by all organisations is Email communications and we don’t see that ending any time soon. End of Support for legacy services have been announced to support the growth towards the cloud.  For example, Microsoft Exchange 2013 is going end of support in 2023, in addition to the previously announced end of support for Exchange 2010 coming in Oct 2020. Your customers might think they have time yet to move away from 2010 and loads of time to move away from 2013. This thinking process then begs the question, why?

Hopefully this article will help provide answers to questions you or your customers may have about why to make the move to cloud, and lay to rest concerns that make procrastinating possible.

Before getting ahead of ourselves, let’s review the working definition of SaaS. It’s basically software or services that run in the cloud. Instead of having your own email or data server or infrastructure onsite, you ‘rent’ the services by means of a subscription model, which is often monthly. There are other ‘As a Service’ offerings such as Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service which offer additional services to meet all your technology needs. The below pizza analogy portrays what ‘As a Service’ can offer.

Now that you have a better understanding of what can be with cloud technology (‘As a Service’ model), it would be good to take you down the highway of gold where you see the benefits.

#1: The investment factor, or rather, the lack thereof

With cloud services, the customer can just use what they need for their company in a present moment without having  to worry about having a buffer or extra licences in case. Most basic email servers have the capacity to handle emails of 80 to 100 people no problem. That is also of waste if say the customer only has 8 users. By the time we factor in the cost of a consultant to periodically come and update/maintain it for them the costs soon add up. Cloud technology allows you to scale up and scale down as the customer needs. Basic management skills are needed and if stuck, intY is here to help troubleshoot any issues you might have.

#2: Easy to try and buy, leave at any time

Like a car show room, customers can take the services for a test drive at no cost to you. There are various trials at the moment like Microsoft Teams. Also with rolling 30 day contracts with cloud, the customer can decide to stop their services if they need to without being tied into annual contracts.

 #3: It grows with your customer needs

You are not stuck with just one software suite to offer to your customers. If your customer needs to change to something with more power or services, it’s quick and easy to upgrade instantly with a few clicks. No more headaches of having to patch or update manually.

#4: Cloud solutions are now safer than on-premise

Security in technology has started to get the attention that it deserves. Sadly, the security of most organisations is still behind the ability of hackers. This is another reason why cloud based services are now more secure than their on-prem counter parts. Looking at Microsoft for example, you are guaranteed that you can offer your customers the best security available. With 99.9% uptime as well as disaster recovery capability, this translates to 8 hours of down time a year, you know you are covered even if the worst happens.  It also has multiple layers of protection from Multifactor Authentication to Advanced Threat Protection. These and various other lines of defence are customisable to suit your company and how it works, with capability to safely work with a number of 3^rd party services.

#5: Deployment is an absolute breeze

Mass deploying within a company is very easy to do and gives both you and the end customer the ability to customise your set up by user interface and not have to earn a degree in scripting. There are tools like BitTitan MigrationWiz sold by intY that can help do the lift and shift for your migrations from on-premise to cloud. Change management is often the hardest part of any new deployment, but with Microsoft services being widely known and understood it is easy to get them from zero to pro in no time. intY offers migration services to give you all the control but none of the pain. Talk with us today to see how we can assist you.

#6: Platform independence

Cloud services run from a host of rich web applications that can run in any browser, on any platform. Hardware platforms, operating systems and other factors that used to limit the choice of software in the past, aren’t an issue anymore. Whether our cloud solutions are run on Mac OS, Windows or Linux, it looks and feels precisely the same.

#7: Zero infrastructure

No big, expensive servers to maintain, no storage systems to monitor. Well, that’s kind of a lie: the servers are still there but they don’t reside in some vault in the office. They are someone else’s problem and they are there for your customers to just use, which does give you peace of mind and not worry about traveling to manage some hardware that is sitting in the basement.

#7: Wealth of information a ‘Bing’ search away

Whatever problem you have with a cloud technology, the odds are high that other people have had it before. So going to TechNet articles for Microsoft is a good place to start. There are numerous forums and blogs available that will also provide guidance and answers.

intY has a team of highly skilled engineers that are just an email or phone call away from helping you fix what may be broken.

Conclusion

The best time to save and make money is now. By moving away from old technologies and methodologies that are on life support by their makers, you could be opening you and your customers to a new way of being productive and efficient. Now you have the knowledge to make timely business decisions based on facts, and a better understanding of what can be done with cloud solutions.

With intY’s tailored professional services, you can save time and make money by having us do the on-premise to cloud email migrations for you, while being kept up to date with what is going on.

If you are still not sure about the benefits of cloud or what path might be best for you, then please reach out to the Sales and Support teams at intY, where some clever individuals can help you make the right decision.