According to the 2018 IDG Cloud computing study, 73% of organizations have some portion of their infrastructure in the cloud. There are many reasons for moving to the cloud that we’ve discussed in other articles, but to sum it up: lower hardware costs, less pressure on your IT team, safety, support, backups, and employees can more easily work from anywhere. Those are a ton of benefits, which is why so many business owners are moving to cloud servers and cloud products.

With so much information out there, many people run to the internet, do the research they think they need and then just jump on the solution that seems to meet their needs… without consulting with an expert. Even if you know a lot about your IT structure and needs, and even all the steps we mentioned in 5 Things to Make our Move to the Cloud Seamless, you might run into challenges among the structure depending on your infrastructure. That’s why we always recommend having an expert there for a second opinion.

A second opinion can make a huge difference to the cost of your IT infrastructure budget, the safety of your data and the stress on your team. Experts can help things move smoothly, rather than a learning-as-we-go experience which is not what you want with your most important asset – your data.

Why you need an expert:

You don’t need to start with an expert, but learn from our clients mistakes. Here are some of the migrations that went wrong for some of our clients before they came to us for help.

The migration wasn’t safe.

Even though they ensured the starting server was safe and the end place in the cloud was safe, their data was not safe in the transfer. Migration through a network means you can open the door to new attacks – especially when you are transferring large amounts of data. It can be difficult to control and depending on the beginning and ending locations determines the safer ways of doing it. An expert would have known the best way to safely transfer their information.

Loss of data

Many clients have older systems on their servers and how they stored their data was built over time – often by just adding more places to hold information without real organization or intelligence behind the structure. This means that without knowing it, you could be missing some requirements your data needs in order to ensure it doesn’t lose any of its integrity. There may be certain types of attachments or data that need to be translated first. An expert would have been able to help a few clients before they moved it and caused a lot more downtime and changeover challenges.

Best solutions

Every day more and more solutions are finding a way to the cloud. At this time, you may be choosing to change to a new product to get to the cloud when all you have to do is wait a year to keep the solution you have which will offer a cloud version. This means little to no data translation and they can keep everything looking and working similar to how you already have it. That all equals less of a learning curve.

In another instance, an expert can help you find the tools that fit your business requirements best and can even help you plan for growth so that your infrastructure can easily keep up. Or it could be that you could be combining several of your technology tools to one that fits your business best that you may not know about. The cost from having systems that don’t fit or that are unnecessary could pay for your expert alone.

Call us

We want to help you make the most economical, secure and smooth migration to the cloud. Contact us to talk about your business and technology needs.