Continued evolutions in the options around Cloud and the possible benefits to be gained are worth revisiting if you have not evaluated Cloud options recently. The pace of obsolescence of hardware and the related on-going cost of support and maintenance for the required infrastructure of your company could be higher than the cost of migrating to a cloud solution, or partially cloud-based solution.

The varieties of options are expanding – with a clear benefit to small to middle market companies – that want to utilize enterprise-class capabilities that provide Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery and operational standards that they would be unable to afford otherwise. Cloud services can also allow smaller enterprises to get these operations running in a generally much smaller timeframe – as they don’t have the resource and financial challenges related to ‘typical’ on-site IT infrastructure.

The variety of Cloud services available and the cost savings that can be associated with Cloud computing can provide small to middle market companies the ability to redirect capital, reduce overall IT services and Resources costs, and provide a level of reliability they are not currently able to achieve.

Cloud services require the same level of assessment around, fit, options, needs, costs as any other IT solution. And as a solution, should be evaluated around some key criteria and some higher-level filters as well as across the company’s primary objectives and roadmap around core/key systems and solutions. For example;
Are you considering a Private or Hybrid Cloud?
Are the primary issues infrastructure, applications, or both?
Are there older legacy systems running in on-premise hardware that have dependencies that prevent them from being migrated to the Cloud?
Does the company plan to grow at a rate that Cloud scalability is a key factor?
What level of performance does the company need – and does the Cloud offer a cost-competitive or cost-reducing mechanism for doing so?
There are additional points of consideration as with any solution – but the availability and proliferation of variety in the Cloud computing arena make this an even better time to evaluate overall IT strategy and roadmaps – to ensure that technology is enabling growth in a company, and to investigate whether or not it’s time to start the migration process.