What you should know about Cloud Computing and Office 365
In this article
Traditionally, if you needed a new server for your business, you bought an expensive piece of equipment, screwed it into a rack, turned it on, and installed the software.
Now we have cloud computing, which makes the server software independent from the equipment. You could have ten servers worth of software running on one piece of equipment, or you could have the server software running on equipment in someone else’s building!
As a business owner or CIO, you may find that cloud computing is perfect for your business. Here are some things to know:
There are two types of cloud computing; in-house and external.
In-house cloud computing is using a virtualization product like VMWare or Microsoft Hyper-V to separate your server software from the equipment. You can buy some high quality equipment and run a dozen servers on it. Cloud computing lets you manage it all centrally and do maintenance on the equipment without having to shut down servers.
External cloud computing is provided by some of the biggest names in technology: Amazon, IBM, Google, and Microsoft are a few examples. They have loads of server equipment in huge buildings across the world. When you create an account with them, you can reserve a specific amount of equipment (such as ten processors and 1,000 GB disk space) and then install your server software onto it. You will want to set up a connection from your business to your cloud provider (across the Internet), but otherwise the experience will be just like having the servers in your building.
Using cloud computing allows you to rapidly expand or contract your equipment use.
Since cloud computing separates the equipment from your servers, it makes it much easier to add more equipment, re-purpose it, or even remove it depending on your needs.
Cloud computing is one of the most efficient ways to have highly-available, redundant servers.
Cloud computing lets servers virtually “migrate” from one piece of equipment to another. This lets you maintain equipment or even suffer a hardware failure without impacting your servers.
Cloud computing saves you facilities costs for power, cooling, space, racks, and cabling.
If you use an external cloud provider, you let them deal with all of the facilities for hosting equipment. Even if you do cloud computing in-house, you will still see savings because you will be running less equipment than using traditional hardware.
Cloud computing lets you keep your IT staff trim
If you use an external cloud provider, your package may include installing software programs, checking backups, and running security patches. If you do cloud computing in-house, your IT staff will be able to maintain the systems more efficiently using virtualization software.
In the long-term, you will still pay for hardware and licensing costs
If you do the math for five years, you will find that cloud computing costs a little more than purchasing your own servers. But you save on human costs. Big providers like AWS have really good failover, redundancy, and networking capabilities that small and medium businesses just can’t reproduce.
Are you thinking about migrating to Office 365, or AWS, or Microsoft Azure?
You should! Our clients love their Office 365, and the cloud hosting by AWS and Microsoft Azure are top-notch. Companies that migrate to AWS or Microsoft hosting have great business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities without even trying.
Why choose us?
We thoroughly test our solutions, train your staff, and keep your network running..
Kieri Solutions is at our heart a systems engineering company. We are used to designing and implementing solutions for real companies that want Resilient IT. At the most basic, this means not breaking your network! Our senior engineers and systems architects are used to working on critical infrastructure such as nuclear plants, military, and healthcare. We are very careful. And we test to make sure everything works before we continue onward. This means less impact for your users and minimizing the cost to your business from lost work.
We are local, and will be available to support in the future.
When you fly in a consultant from a big name company, you will probably never meet that person again. In contrast, once we have performed a project for you, we stand by our work and will respond if you have problems later on. We will also remember you and your network – you won’t be starting from scratch with us.
Our rates are typically half that of a big-name company.
Since we don’t need to fly our employees around, and because we have a smaller footprint, we don’t need to charge crazy rates. We will be glad to give you a no-risk estimate.
Kieri Solutions provides systems consulting to businesses in Maryland: Frederick, Baltimore, Columbia, Rockville, and other cities in MD!
For more information, see these awesome articles from PCMag, CIO, and TechRepublic:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330238,00.asp
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-state-of-cloud-computing-10-things-you-need-to-know/
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