Myths about moving to ‘The Cloud’

‘The Cloud’ is fast becoming one of the most common and widely used terms in IT, however, it may have several meanings or definitions depending on your objective. Cloud technology can be deployed in many ways, whether you are concerned with creating an on-premise Private Cloud capable of supporting your organisation with better relationships between your teams (the provider) and the wider business (the consumer) or even if you are looking to move to a fully off-premise hosted offering, there are lots of questions and grey areas that surround it.

The cost savings and increased flexibility/agility that can be endured when moving to the cloud is often overshadowed by completely skewed and contradictory information. So, let’s set the record straight and bust some of the myths that cast a ‘cloud’ over… The Cloud. We’ve cherry picked a few which we’ll explore below.


 

Office 365 is just office tools in the cloud, and I can only use it online

Office 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity services. This includes the Office desktop client you already know and use, including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, with the added benefit of being licensed, deployed, and updated as a service. These applications are installed on your device, so they’re even available when you are offline.

Keeping data on-premises is safer than in the cloud

The Microsoft global incident response team work around the clock to mitigate the effects of any breach or attacks on their cloud services. Just because your data is stored on-premise, it doesn’t inherently make it safer and more secure than keeping it in the cloud. In fact, Microsoft is an industry leader in keeping data secure, as they have more resources than many small companies may have, which thus makes storing data on Azure just as safe as on-premises storage. Learn more about safety and security in the cloud here.

Cloud migration is too much for my business to handle

Some businesses consider the prospect of moving a colossal amount of data to the cloud as a bridge too far. It’s not as simple as the flick of a light switch, but you can be up and running up quickly for agile initiatives and calculated data migrations. risual have developed an ‘Optimised Service Vision’ that takes your IT and Business stakeholders on a journey through cloud computing using our bespoke model that can be tailored to meet your exact requirements. Sometimes a mixture of both Private and Public cloud technologies integrated seamlessly is the best starter point.

If our data moves to the cloud, our business will no longer have control over our technology

When you move to the cloud, headaches and time spent maintaining hardware and upgrading software are significantly reduced. This has a positive rather than a negative effect on your business, as it frees of time for you to spend strategically support business managers in a much more agile fashion, responding to their needs quickly. Less time managing servers and storage, means more time for you to spend on the things that really matter.


 

Download the Microsoft eBook ‘Nine myths about moving to the cloud’ here.

Read more about risual’s ‘Optimised Service Vision’ here.

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