Cloud Hosting

The 21-day lockdown and the expected economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic make this an ideal time for companies to complete their move to cloud computing, says Sequel Support.

Were already seeing some sectors suffering serious losses, and we can expect the economy to suffer for some time after the COVID-19 crisis is over, says Sequel Support MD Michael Zellhorn.

At the same time, companies have been forced to adapt quickly to the concept of cloud computing and remote work, he says. But in many cases, companies are still running physical servers, resulting in a maintenance and resilience challenge. Right now, if youre managing your own physical servers remotely, you would still have to go into the office in the event of a hardware failure. The opportunity and advantage for those who can move to the cloud is there right now. In six months time, when things return to normal, the advantage will have been lost.

The arrival of major in-country cloud data centres, and a drop in cloud computing costs, make cloud a compelling proposition, he says.

Many companies have been sitting on the fence about a complete move to cloud, but this crisis may be the catalyst they need to make the move, he says. By moving their servers to the cloud, they avoid the potential challenge of a machine going down and being unable to access the supply chain for spares during the lockdown. The cloud offers resilience and redundancy, and therefore, overcomes that hurdle. With cloud computing, businesses dont have to worry about the hardware, and they may need fewer people to manage the environment so there could be cost benefits. The cloud also offers advantages such as scalability and best practice security out of the box.

Crucially, by completing the move to the cloud, smaller and midsized companies could position themselves to close brick-and-mortar offices, thereby cutting the cost of office rentals to weather the economic fallout of the pandemic, he says.

Completing the move to cloud is not as complicated as some SMEs may think, Zellhorn says. Each environment is unique, but in an average small business, you could prepare a project plan and then move a small database environment through a cloud backup and restore in a matter of just a few hours. Now thats a proposition worth considering.

Go here to see the original:
Get your business out of the storm and into the cloud - ITWeb