If you’re like most companies, you’ve been in business for a while. A few years back you set aside a corner room for your servers, supplied it with some extra cooling, and maybe even popped in a couple of racks to hold the servers. You built a good working network. You have an email server. You have servers for your applications. And it’s all reasonably fast. You even have a pretty solid sense that your data is safe and secure.
Fast forward to today, and that room has become a little bit dusty. Over the years you’ve added enough servers that the cooling and power is very close to being maxed out. At this point you’re probably pulling your hair out thinking, “I did not sign on to be the IT guy. How did I get roped into configuring every darn laptop, and dealing with Jim who keeps forgetting his password, and worrying about the antivirus subscriptions that are due, and… and… and…!”
You may have even thought, “I should really check out the cloud.”
Zumasys can help you move your IT infrastructure out of your closet and into the cloud—and manage it all so you don’t have to. If you’re thinking about making the leap into the Zumasys Cloud, here are five things you can do to get ready:
Step 1: Admitting you have a problem
First, you need to realize that there really is no reason to keep your servers, data, and backups—your livelihood—housed in that dusty back corner. The industry standard for a server refresh is three to five years (and five years is pushing it). When was the last time you had a full infrastructure refresh? Have you had to recover from a server crash?
Step 2: Sizing yourself up
So you have your email server, your databases, and your company files, but do you really have a good idea of what your actual footprint looks like?
Are your backups working? Do your employees have company files on laptops that can be lost or stolen? What happens if those fall into the wrong hands? It’s important to take inventory of your company data to know where it is and how much space it consumes.
Step 3: Asking what applications you need to stay in business
If you’re like most businesses, you can’t function without email or Microsoft Office. But every department in your company also has specialized apps that they need every day, such as QuickBooks, Timberline, and Famous. Are you properly licensed? Do you have 40 users hitting Acrobat Professional but only own two copies? Any chance that there is a letter from our friends at Microsoft requesting audit information?
Step 4: Embracing mobility
To stay competitive while retaining the quality employees that you have worked hard to keep, you need to offer the flexibility of the cloud. Employees need the ability to work from home, and they want access to the network while they are sitting at the airport expensing that third Guinness.
Step 4 is about accepting that there is a new way to do things, that this is the new reality, and that you will have happier, more productive users if you are willing to make the jump.
Step 5: Letting go of the physical
I had a customer once who said, “I’d be in the cloud now, except I really want to be able to come down to this room and kick the servers if I need to.” That guy paid a ton to update all his server, cooling, and power equipment—and in three years he will do it again.
When I was a Zumasys customer as the Sr. Systems Admin for Roel Construction in San Diego, I felt the same way. What I didn’t realize was that in exchange for yielding that control, I was actually gaining freedom—freedom from that dusty, loud, cold, little room. When Roel moved to Zumasys, we gained insane redundancy, using the kind of infrastructure that some massive companies don’t even have. We moved into the Switch SuperNAP, which is one of the largest data centers in the world. All of the concerns I had about power, cooling, and server failure were no longer on my radar.
So what do you gain with Zumasys? Worrying about backups becomes a thing of the past. You can reduce your local servers down to one—or none. Your users can access their data from anywhere that has an internet connection. And if you suddenly find your company doubling in size, Zumasys can rapidly scale to meet your needs.
So what are you waiting for? Call Zumasys today to talk about moving your business from the closet to the cloud.
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