6 Reasons to Consider Cloud Services

Cloud Services Austin, TX

I have been surprised of late by the number of companies that are looking at and discussing ways to move their entire IT infrastructure into the cloud.  We have companies with as few as 10 employees to as many as 4000 that have made the jump, but cloud services, or in this case moving your entire office to the cloud is not a fit for everyone.

As with everything, your mileage may vary, but here are six typical business use cases that a move to 100% cloud services would typically make sense for.

1. Organizations with 10-100 people.  I can already hear the comments I am going to get.  Yes, there are great use cases for companies with fewer than 10 or more than 100 employees, but not always a slam dunk.  Small companies benefit because their IT needs are limited and often so is their capital, so the idea of paying monthly for the IT services the business consumes can make a lot of sense.  The upper limit of 100 employees is more of a moving target.  As costs continue to decrease, that number will continue to rise and full hosted cloud services will make sense to more and more businesses.
2. Organizations with limited IT resources.  Limited resources could be capital to buy IT equipment or limited technical resources available to maintain and repair the company’s existing IT infrastructure.
3. New organizations that have IT needs but no legacy infrastructure.  This is the “clean slate” use case.  A few short years ago buying IT infrastructure or leasing it was the only logical option, today cloud services have evolved to a point where in more cases than not, it does not make sense to own IT infrastructure, simply get it as a service.  Yes, it is never “paid for” but that is more than a fair trade off for never having big upfront capital expense, negotiating a Microsoft software agreement, managing legacy software purchases and licensing, replacing power supplies and hard drives, worrying about backups or finding someone to fix things.
4. Organizations preferring operational expenses to capital expenses, looking to move everything to the cloud.  This one, I am sure, seems obvious as it relates to cloud services, but I listed it here because not all organizations are a great fit.  Avoiding CAPEX costs are a driving factor, but the ultimate use case and workloads need to be suited to cloud services.
5. Organizations with BYOD initiatives.  Citrix, AppSense, AirWatch, Fiberlink, Good, MobileIron, Symantec, and 33 other vendors all have solutions to help you get a BYOD strategy in place.  Delivered with cloud services, you do not have to bother to know the names of any of them; just know if they meet your requirements.  Someone else installs the technology and maintains it, you just get the benefits.
6. Heavy dependence upon Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop or VMware View.   At first pass, you might think this would fit under point two, and for some it might.  I broke this one out because I see this use case so frequently.  This point really holds true for any technology that requires a special skill set that is difficult or expensive to obtain.  In the case of Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop or VMware View, which are core technologies to some businesses that must perform, cloud services can offload all of the complexity required to setup and maintain these technologies. 

Regardless of where you are today, buying your own IT infrastructure and putting it in a data center located in your offices, in a co-location facility, or working with a Managed Services Provider, cloud services will continue to creep closer and closer over the course of time, having a more significant impact on your business, no matter what you do.  Moving your entire office into the cloud and having your IT infrastructure delivered as a cloud services may or may not make sense for you today, but it certainly makes sense to understand how “the cloud” is changing the business landscape.