Tuesday 7 February 2012

Coffee Reading: Storm Clouds on the Horizon

The “Cloud” is the really big push happening right now where vendors are essentially looking to wrest control of the traditional client from frontline IT support companies and/or in-house IT departments.

Okay, so the above statement is a little pessimistic but talking to so many IT providers the above is definitely a predominant theme.

The following CloudBeat article is an excellent synopsis of a few of the downsides to dropping IT services into the Cloud and something that _all_ business owners need to be aware of:

The 4 reasons are items that we may have had nagging at the back of our minds but were unable to express quite as clear as this article does.

  1. Business owner is no longer in control.
  2. Business owner and their business is not the most important part of anything.
  3. The business owner and their business can have any colour they want as long as it’s black.
  4. The business still needs in-house hardware and an in-house IT staff.

The shocking realization when it comes to point 4 when it comes to Office 365 is that there are _huge_ requirements for in-house infrastructure for larger organizations that want to maintain user account synchronization between the organization and Microsoft’s service.

For us small guys keeping track of things manually may not be too painful, but once an organization gets beyond the 75-100 user mark some serious decisions need to be made.

As with any service that one is looking at it is important to know the Terms & Conditions for that server and if there are any Prerequisites so one does not get surprised by anything when it comes to project implementation time.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

No comments: