Moving To Cloud Services?

Small businesses can easily make the transition to cloud services for their I.T. operations. The benefits are real and the costs can be much lower than keeping everything on-premise in your own server closet. Even if you don't have a traditional file server, domain controller, or other application servers. If you deploy Windows Enterprise and Office 365 with an E-mail plan, you can consolidate and streamline much of your communication, collaboration and compute functions and have a more professional presence on the web.

A remote desktop deployment can place all your disparate installs of line-of-business applications on a single server (or server farm) in a virtual environment on a reliable and safe cloud service provider. Applications are installed once, configured centrally and maintained with an organized plan. Your resources are scalable, meaning especially that your data storage and compute resources can be increased and decreased to meet changing demands. That means lower costs during off-peak workload times.

Offloading a lot of headaches is attractive. Abdicating your responsibility for your customers' and your company's data is not one of the benefits, however. You cannot hand off the risks to your business to a cloud provider. Yes, they will physically secure your resources and exercise due diligence to protect their overall exposure to their customer base, but you as the business principal must ask what functions you must still perform to ensure your data retention, privacy and continuity. It is very unlikely that anyone is going to break into a major data center and damage or steal storage and data by physical means. And, the reliability of your applications is almost always increased by being in a secure cloud computing facility. Beyond this, here are some questions to be considered:

• What are the threats to my data from within my own company through malware or malice? Are my employees and partners well educated on dealing with common phishing and other security compromising things they come across in everyday work, especially through e-mail and web browser deficiencies.
• How do I know that if the data center gets compromised that I can continue business operations, not lose customers and not be subject to huge disclosure issues?
• Does the provider operate in an actual partnership role, or will they hold my data hostage and be slow to accomodate changes and keep me informed about their operations and threat levels. There is no better source of information here than existing customers (and former customers). Most every provider paints a rosy picture. How do they respond when things go wrong?
• Is the technical support immediate or do you have to "put in a ticket" for every little thing and then wait. And how long is the wait? How often are service level agreements met? If you need an application update today, can you get it done?
• Is there reimbursement or credit for service outages and how are they done; and how quickly?
• Is there an account manager assigned by the provider? How long does it take to get an answer from that person?
• Does the provider assist you in developing a comprehensive data backup plan that allows you to have a hard (disk or separate online) copy of your data, refreshed regularly. Cloud providers who have many customers may have large "threat surfaces", making your data more susceptible to infection or damage across customer spaces than it would be in your own on-premise storage. Never leave all your eggs in one basket only. Most companies should have a copy of their operating data stored in safe at home or in a third party vault. Without that, you are at the mercy of the provider.

At my little company, we construct complete operating environments with Microsoft Azure, tailored to customer needs with flexible operating and billing tactics to keep cost down and service levels up. Many Microsoft Partners and Cloud Service Providers and can create and support small business cloud resources with a local and regional focus on support. Delivering good quality cloud-based services no longers requires huge capital outlays and long startup times. A typical small business deployment of remote desktop services integrated with other cloud resources (like Office 365) can be done in an afternoon. Data migration and mail migration takes extra time, as well as training and workstation tailoring; usually a couple of more days.