Tense? Anxious? Divisive?
2020 introduced significant cost-pressures to businesses of all sizes in the UK. From lost income due to lockdown and unexpected shifts in the market, there has been a serious revenue crunch accelerating decisions about IT investments, legacy hardware and how to stay responsive and profitable in this strange new world.
Many businesses decided to freeze or cut IT budgets in the early stages of lockdown or to pause planned spending in order to wait for the dust to settle.
But now that we are months beyond the initial shutdown in March, you and your team may be wondering: ‘With budgets in limbo, is it worth it to spend on cloud hosting, migration or IT security projects right now?’
78% of UK businesses say that a hybrid workforce is set to become the norm, which means that flexible, secure and decentralised IT is now the key to success for organisations in all sectors.
Staying tied to on-premises infrastructure or private servers will hinder your future growth, if it hasn’t already crippled your business in lockdown. When you virtualise your core IT infrastructure, it will better support remote maintenance, seamless collaboration and your dispersed team in the new distributed model of working.
· Cloud hosting helps you to virtualise your core
Cloud hosting allows businesses to reduce their IT costs by trading capital expenditures on hardware and infrastructure for the fixed, monthly and easily adjusted costs of cloud hosting and software or platform as-a-service.
If your core infrastructure has been virtualised, you’re no longer reliant on physical access to maintain, patch and upgrade your IT and communications. This can all be done remotely with the help of an MSP or self-service through a cloud dashboard. Businesses with a virtualised core have a clear data strategy that allows your IT and business systems to operate as a continuous, integrated process without gaps in functionality or sporadic availability that negatively impact both the employee and customer experience.
· Cloud hosting enhances business continuity
In the sudden shift to remote working, cloud computing infrastructure and software helped to keep businesses online, communicating and functioning with very little disruption! Cloud computing has provided a stable platform to preserve business continuity and help organisations deliver their value to customers despite significant internal and external pressures.
Cloud SaaS services like Office 365 and Microsoft Teams significantly reduced the strain on internal servers, enabling staff to collaborate and communicate from home with ease. As businesses rely on these services to communicate internally and continue to serve their customers, it is vital that cloud services remain available and stable. Investment into these collaborative cloud-based tools will lift a significant burden off your internal team’s shoulders, in part because these tools deliver excellent uptime, availability and accessibility from anywhere in the world.
· Reduce sprawl through cloud resource management
Agile cloud hosting offers greater control and visibility of your entire IT network, including who in your organisation is using cloud, how much and for what purposes. With user control panels and granular-level reporting from your cloud provider, you can keep a close eye on how your resources are allocated. This keeps IT investments from spiralling and sprawling over time, pushing your already stretched budget to its limits.
Not only that, but an ageing IT infrastructure with private servers could become one of your biggest roadblocks to success. According to IDC research, the relative performance of IT assets like servers declines rapidly after year 3, down to 59% of capacity by year 72. By their 5th year, the expenses of maintaining and supporting a server increase by approximately 148%!
As your servers age and their performance capacity declines, they become more and more expensive to maintain. An agile cloud hosting strategy reduces your total cost of ownership (TCO), as you benefit from the powerful, state-of-the-art servers used by MSPs like SysGroup. Cloud hosting gives you the computing power and flexibility that was previously only available to the biggest enterprises with dedicated IT budgets and strategies.
We help customers migrate their workloads depending on the most appropriate environment for their data and transactions. We can help you to examine your approach to people, processes and technology in order to stay productive, secure and compliant—with an IT infrastructure that supports your future growth.
A virtualised core IT infrastructure allows your business to pursue a cloud computing and IT strategy that is data-driven, with all of your data and files stored in the most appropriate environment. This allows you to optimise for your budget, compute resource usage, compliance requirements, security and more, creating an IT network that is fit-for-purpose, not one-size-fits-all.
An infrastructure audit is an ideal first step you can take to apply the lessons learned from lockdown.
In the infrastructure audit process, our experienced IT consultants audit the components and functioning of your IT estate to provide: