Cut Your IT Costs By Moving Your Business Applications To The Cloud

What do you do if you need to run Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server but you don’t have the expertise to hand to manage the system on a day to day basis? With the arrival of cloud computing, you can simply migrate your existing business applications to the cloud and access them using a web browser. Once you have logged in to your cloud computing service, all of your usual business applications are accessible from a Windows 7 style desktop.

It’s called a “Hosted Desktop” service, and it’s increasingly proving to be a smart decision for small businesses. You get your own server managed by the hosting provider. What you lose is the need to maintain Windows servers and having to make sure that all of the latest security patches are installed. 

If you would like to know how a hosted desktop service looks when you use it, take a look at the video below by ThinkGrid who we use for our client installations:

Thinkgrid Hosted Desktop Video

Since hosted desktop services are accessed via a web browser, you don’t need a high spec computer to run your business applications, so it may allow you to defer an upgrade to your company’s PC’s. What’s more, your IT systems can be accessed by any device that has a connection to the Internet, allowing your staff to use both tablets such as iPads and Android tablets, as well as home PC’s if you have home workers.

Data Security is an important concern when it comes to cloud computing, and rightly so, but there are plenty of measures that can be taken to protect your data. Where personal data needs to be protected, you can quite easily encrypt all data saved in specific folders and still allow it to be shared between members of your project teams. Even so, hosting companies that their responsibilities to protect your data very seriously, and employ rigorous procedures to protect customer data.

By moving your company applications and data to the cloud, you will be able to eliminate server support and management costs. Data backup, business continuity planning and archiving also come as part of the deal. What’s more, you only ever pay for what you need, when you need it. One day, I am convinced that all companies will run their IT systems from the cloud. You just need to decide when to begin your journey. 

What is stopping you from moving your business applications to the cloud? Please let me know using the contact form below. We will either reply to your points via a future blog post, or as a private email as appropriate.