The technology world was rapidly changing before COVID-19 with significant shifts towards cloud computing and away from capital intensive technology purchases.
COVID-19 has accelerated these changes with seismic shifts in three key ways. It has:
- Forced your staff to work from home, outside of your office.
- Complicated security with staff working outside your corporate firewall and often on home computers.
- Forced many businesses to cut or freeze costs in order to survive in the short term, and keep staff so they can hopefully thrive post-pandemic.
Technology is a significant cost. How do you know that your cloud investment is optimised?
Like many technology investments, cloud is often a compromise between cost, security and functionality?
Cost
Not all Cloud operators are the same
The two dominant players, Microsoft Azure and AWS have significant scale compared to smaller boutique providers and this gives them prices advantages. But even if you’re already in these environments, optimising your technology deployment and understanding their pricing models can reduce your IT spend. Microsoft for example offers some price-matching guarantees and their reserved instances are significantly cheaper than on-demand pricing if you understand your server workloads.
Security
https://visits.com.au/what-we-do/cloud-2/Regardless of where your systems are hosted, you and your IT team play a major role in securing your data. Configuration errors and mistakes in system management practices account for many security breaches.
When it comes to security technology, the large scale public cloud environments are solid and hardened, with their investments in the best technologies and security personnel swamping what smaller cloud providers, let alone your own internal IT, can achieve.
“Conventional wisdom” that public cloud is insecure because it’s a target for hackers is simply wrong. The fallacy of “security through obscurity” quickly evaporates when you check your security logs and discover how many threat actors are targeting your business every day. Put your systems behind the best security technology you can find and afford.
Functionality
From AI and blockchain to bots and traditional cloud servers, the major cloud platforms provide huge flexibility to tailor your technology to your business needs. They offer functionality that your internal IT teams and smaller cloud providers simply cannot deliver.
What is the best option for your business?
Large scale public cloud like Microsoft Azure is not always the best solution.
But in many cases it delivers reduced costs, increased security and greater flexibility. A win-win-win situation that is very unusual in business, and something you need to consider in our current challenging times.
Register your interest to join our Virtual Executive Roundtable for senior IT decision makers where we will be talking with McGrathNicol about how to cut your IT costs and not your staff as well as how you can improve your security and move to the right Cloud
Adam Feldman
Managing Director