While the Chinese Zodiac may state that it is the “Year of the Horse,” technology dictates that 2014 will be the year of the cloud. More and more companies, small and large are beginning to understand the benefits that cloud computing offer including reduced up-front investments, lower labor costs, access to enterprise-grade infrastructure, stability, scalability, and flexibility. However, deciding exactly when to make the jump can be a complicated matter. Even though the benefits are enormous, making the move without the proper planning and consideration is ill-advised. Every company should carefully consider all aspects of the move before taking the plunge.

There are a number of reasons why you may want to utilize the cloud services. Do any of the following “when-factors” sound as if they describe your organization? If so, you may want to learn more about the options available to you and consider a move to the cloud.

  • New Business or Product Launch – When you enter a new market or change the way you do business, it may be the right time to switch to the cloud. Even moving some components of the IT stack to the cloud can take some of the pressure off your IT team and reduce their workload that will likely already be larger than usual.
  • End of Life Stage for Hardware or Software – This can be a great time to reassess IT input and output channels. You may find that when it is time to upgrade that moving to a cloud-based IT service makes sense.
  • Growing Customer Base – If your growing customer base requires high uptime, and future scalability, cloud-based services are a natural choice. Deployment of VM clones allow for instant growth, scalability on demand makes future growth easy and a fully-redundant infrastructure makes for an unbeatable uptime rate.
  • Security Woes – If top-notch security and compliance for apps is needed, you may consider a broad range of managed security devices and services as well as the geographic location of the data.
  • Need for Disaster Recovery –BDR solutions takes incremental snapshots of your in-house servers or SANS. When disaster strikes,  failover into a new cloud environment or restore the images.
  • Separate IT Systems Needed – Instead of spending for separate systems for each department, Dedicated Cloud allows departments to deploy VMs that can address needs without overspending.
  • Fast Turnaround Times – If your current project turnaround times are unrealistic for your current setup, we can help you provision new VMs to quickly create and store templates to provision on-demand.
  • Unsure of Current and Future Needs – It is challenging to assess the needed resources for each department in a firm—and things are constantly changing. Our system allows you to change resources on-demand or adjust VMs to meet performance needs.

The cloud is no longer considered a trend—Research group Gartner predicts that end-user spending on cloud computing could reach $180 billion annually by 2015. This means that if you have not yet made the move, you may be doing so whether you are fully prepared or not. Luckily, you can utilize the cloud in many different ways, so if one option does not work for you, perhaps something else will.

The best way to make sure your switch to cloud is smooth is by developing a plan. You do not have to make the move all by yourself.

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