Transferring to the Cloud: The Perfect Storm

Although many of us may not realize, our IT equipment has a predictable life span of about 5 years! To help our clients keep track of hardware and budget for replacement, we maintain detailed asset management information for all clients and provide strategic roadmaps of future investment. 

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For clients needing to run their own servers, thankfully the Cloud is now an option because Internet connectivity options have improved in regional Australia.

We are talking about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering whereby clients “rent” servers from a datacentre. We recommend clients utilise Tier 1 datacentres (Microsoft Azure, Telstra, ect.) and hosting it somewhere lower rated adds unnecessary risk.

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What are the benefits of moving to the Cloud?

Cloud hosting your network delivers risk mitigation strategies including:

• The datacentre is responsible for gradual hardware refreshes, reducing downtime.
• The datacentre hardware has high redundancy against hardware failure through spare capacity, reducing downtime.
• The datacentre physical security is significantly higher than securing local premises.
• The datacentre costs include all power, cooling, insurance and have invested in multiple power sources and backup generators. 
• Tier 1 datacentres have multiple locations in Australia allowing for redundancy in the event one datacentre is impacted by a major outage.
• In the event of physical loss of the client’s premises (power outage or natural disaster), the datacentre systems are unaffected and users with a workstation/laptop and Internet connection can continue to work from anywhere.
• Implementing a new application can be solved by simply allocating additional datacentre resources – on-premises servers may not have capacity to easily expand and it takes more time to source and install the additional server hardware.
• If the existing on-premises server design and functionality is migrated using what’s called a lift-and-shift method, moving to the Cloud does not impact how users interact with the systems.  
• Costs are billed monthly, reducing impact on cash flow, and easily scaling up and down with business requirements.
• Once moved to the Cloud, the 5 yearly investment needed to refresh servers disappears.

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How can we help?

At Cloudwize, we’re not wedded to any one strategy and we work with our clients to ensure that the solution deployed is right for them.  If that needs to be on-premises, hybrid or totally in the Cloud, we can design, implement, and maintain the perfect solution that suits your business. 

Reach out to a Cloudwize representative to answer any other questions you may have!