We’ve certainly now passed the initial novelty of the cloud. At Chalkline, our team have been doing cloud migrations for well over 10 years. Most companies we speak to now have their email in the cloud, typically using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
We do see a lot of organisations having a “hybrid” setup where they have one or more on-premise servers, but more and more organisations are now going “full cloud” where they don’t have servers at all.
Now the initial hype is over, and we’re even starting to get into subsequent refresh cycles following a cloud move, we’re starting to see certain trends:
Licensing – quite a change!
This becomes far more predictable when you move to the cloud. What was previously perpetual or a long-term investment, is now a flexible, monthly cost. More flexibility does mean more cost in some situations, so it’s important to work with a good IT Procurement partner to make sure you are using the right commitment periods and using the right licenses for your business.
The other huge difference is versioning. Previously, you would purchase a specific version of a product, like Microsoft Office 2016 or Adobe Photoshop CS6. This meant people often were versions behind as they didn’t want to spend money to upgrade their licensing. The cloud equivalent, like Microsoft 365 Apps or Adobe Photoshop CC, means that you always have the latest version of your apps across your business.
Backups – same principal, different technologies
A backup solution may change a bit in terms of the media itself (you are likely to be using a cloud backup instead of tape) but in essence it’s very similar to before. We continue to recommend cloud backup solutions even when your data is stored in the cloud, especially when using an IaaS or PaaS solution.
Floor space, power, air conditioning and maintenance – smaller requirement but not gone!
Now this one is interesting! We’re a “born in the cloud” IT provider, but we have two server racks in our office! Why? We have lots of Ethernet data ports, and so we need the backbone in our office to connect those ports (switches, routers, internet connections, etc). This still needs physical space.
If we were to need on-premise servers, we’d be using a lot more space, and we would also have far higher power & air conditioning requirements in order to keep things running.
Scalability – infinitely better
Especially over the COVID era, we were having to provision new servers with very minimal notice. Physical hardware would be taking 3-4 weeks, by the time we’ve planned, ordered and configured the new equipment – and that’s assuming it was in stock (and nothing was at that time!).
Compare that to Microsoft Azure, where we have been able to provision brand new virtual machines & other cloud resources in a matter of minutes.
Refresh Cycles – not as enforced, but still important
With an on-premise solution, you’d be expecting to swap out the infrastructure every 3-5 years. Failure to do so will leave you with ageing kit with a serious likelihood of performance slowdown and system failures. Moving to the cloud means that the hardware layer is handled by the cloud provider. They use modern kit, make sure it’s running smoothly and replace failed components, usually without any impact to you at all.
Microsoft are continuing to push their Microsoft Azure solution by providing free ESUs (Extended Security Updates) to end-of-life Operating Systems, as long as they are hosted in Azure. On-premise users have to pay additional fees to get that benefit.
It is, of course, still likely that some form of smaller refresh cycle is needed.
Connectivity – more important than ever before
We’ve seen more and more clients move to Leased Lines than ever before. This gives far higher bandwidth and lower latency, resulting in a much faster and smoother connection. Most of these Leased Lines were implemented as part of a cloud migration, to ensure that their experience would not suffer as more & more services were moved to the cloud.
Reliability – much less noise than before
Watching the trends on our Managed Service Desk has been very interesting. We would previously have 3-4 critical (Priority 1 or Priority 2) alerts a week for major server issues – be this a RAID failure, device hardware warning or a server being down for any other reason. While we’re not free of critical incidents, we are now getting 1 a week… and some lucky weeks we get none at all!
This does help to reduce the amount of onsite IT support we need to offer, but the workload on remote IT support has certainly grown – especially with modern devices requiring so much more power than before and constant new releases and security improvements needing to be rolled out.
