Cloud hosting makes applications such as Sage 100 available in a cloud-based environment. This means you can store your Sage ERP on a trusted provider’s secure servers instead of on your in-house hardware. You may also move your entire IT setup to the cloud, eliminating the need to manage, power, and temperature control physical servers or even allocate office space to store them.
Businesses that are tired of the high costs of maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure or that want to provide remote access to applications without relying on an inconsistent VPN connection often leap headfirst into cloud-based hosting — and for very good reasons. Deploying applications in the cloud offers secure, affordable, and stress-free IT managementfor mission-critical business systems. However, it’s essential that companies clearly define their cloud strategy beforechoosing their hosting approach.
Luckily, determining your cloud strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. Follow these three steps to begin.
1. Decide Why You Want to Move to the Cloud
Nowadays, everyone uses buzzwords like agility to explain why the cloud is a great place to be. However, agility is what your company does in the short term to respond to constantly shifting events. Pursuing agility is different than pursuing a long-term strategy.
Instead of focusing on a vague concept like agility, consider how moving to the cloud aligns with your long-term business strategy and other business needs.
As you’re thinking, reflect on the most common cloud benefits. Which of these serve your future plans?
- Security: Hosting with a provider allows you to implement enterprise-grade security to your applications and workloads, along with an around-the-clock team that monitors for, detects, and addresses emerging threats that could compromise your data or compliance.
- Peace of mind: Applications and workloads hosted on the cloud are fully managed, meaning that updates, patches, and optimization for your software are included, which boosts performance and increases uptime.
- Scalability: Rapid growth can make or break your company, depending on how you handle it. With outdated, in-house IT, your systems may not have the capacity or speed to handle increased transactions or usage, but hosting on the cloud easily supports your growth.
- Cost savings: Even if you don’t require new hardware to support rapid growth, you will still need to plan to replace any outdated servers and equipment holding your applications. On the cloud, that’s all taken care of for you.
- Remote access: Whether you’re planning to close offices or want remote work securely available to employees at home or on the go, hosting on the cloud eliminates the need for a VPN and guarantees reliable, secure access anywhere.
2. Determine Whether It Makes Sense to Move All Workloads to the Cloud
This decision will require you to have some data at your fingertips. You’ll want to know what workloads and applications your company is running, their dependencies, and their demand. Once these details are documented, you can start thinking about how much you’d like to move to the cloud.
Your options include:
- Lift and shift
This moves everything to the cloud, giving you the complete infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) experience. You can eliminate your server room and leave IT worries to someone else. Your system will work the same way it does now.
- Archiving some data & lifting and shifting some
Depending on your storage or bandwidth needs, shifting all your data straight to cloud hosting could be expensive. This second option takes longer, but if your provider archives less-used data or historical records to “cold” storage, you can save a lot of money.
- Hybrid hosting
Hosting specific applications in the cloud can free up space and bandwidth from your in-house servers while providing cloud benefits for those applications. This can be a great “best of both worlds” approach, but you’ll want to ensure you don’t shift an application with numerous on-premises dependencies because it may slow down your performance.
3. Decide How You Will Measure Your Outcomes
Once you know which cloud benefits align with your long-term strategy and which workloads you want to migrate, you will need to determine how to measure your outcomes.
For example, if your long-term plan is improving scalability, how will you measure whether your cloud hosting has met your goals? You’ll need a plan to measure and track the growth of your usage and transactions, which can be tricky to figure out.
The best way to define and measure clear metrics is to work closely with your provider before and after migration. This will allow you to optimize and maximize the cloud outcomes that matter most to your company.
Make Cloud Hosting Easy — Work with the Experts at SWK Technologies
Working with a local, approachable, friendly, award-winning expert partner to handle your hosting makes sense.
But it makes even more sense to work with that same expert when they not only provide hosting but also understand and service your ERP solution and have their own in-house team of engineers and consultants who proactively manage and secure the equipment your applications and workloads are stored on.
With a well-rounded provider like that, you would have a team to trust for handling your cybersecurity, ERP updates and maintenance, IT performance, and cloud hosting simultaneously.
Now, that’s peace of mind. And that’s the SWK Technologies difference.