You might recall the nursery rhyme, “Rain, Rain, Go Away, Come Again, Another Day”. Well, some people take this even further and they would say the same of clouds. Not traditional clouds but cloud computing. Let’s discuss that because I am not sure that there’s complete wisdom in that approach. So, let’s look at the Pros and Cons as they might relate to your organization.

My Thoughts

First up, what are the benefits of cloud computing? Why would anybody want to change what they’ve got and go to the cloud?

Well, first up, it provides access to really the latest and greatest technology, almost at an instant. Generally, very easy to get up and running with. Also, when you got access to this new technology, it’s scalable.

If you need more capability or less capability, that’s available at a touch of a button. If your organization is growing, shrinking, usually you’ve got a lot of flexibility there with cloud computing to pay for what you need rather than buying something that might be fixed for a period of years which is the case when you’re buying your own servers.

Other things, well, usually a bit of collaboration when you’re working in a cloud-based world, and the ability for people to work from anywhere.

Well, that’s not always a necessity. Usually most of us like that flexibility of being able to do work from places other than our standard workplace. Looking at cybersecurity that’s also an area we’re now starting to see much better capabilities often from cloud environments than certainly what small organizations would have access to themselves which has access to with just their own on-premises systems and then, of course, there’s a sustainability aspect off cloud as well.

So, are there downsides? Well, there’s always a downside to consider. Not so many in the cloud world and as more time goes on, those downsides are shrinking and reducing and are being addressed.

One that we’ve come across is often out-of-the-box some cloud systems, just their standard offerings might not give you as much flexibility around back-ups and how you would retain information if it got deleted say a year or two years ago, how do you address that in a cloud if your cloud system doesn’t give you an ability to roll back that far.

Certainly, something to think about but in the lower cases, there are ways of catering to that. Another area to think about is your internet performance that certainly plays into how well cloud will work for you in locations such as New Zealand, for instance, there is really really good performance in most business locations with access to gigabit internet speeds for a very low cost. Other parts of the world, maybe not as good, but often that isn’t a huge inhibitor.

Really, it’s well worth considering cloud, so, where should you start? If your organization isn’t really using cloud technologies today, the first place I’d recommend looking is at your email system. If you got an email server that’s on your premises, then, in most organizations these days it makes sense to get rid of that.

Go to the cloud, take advantage of the advanced capabilities, the latest features, the fact that it replicates across numerous locations and backed up for you. That’s something really worth paying for.

That’s it for me. If you’d like to dive in further on this discussion, feel free to join my email updates paulspain.com/updates. Reach out to me here on social media or you can email me directly if you like immediate help around this subject and some input: paul.spain@gorillatechnology.com.