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There has been much talk in recent years about migrating your accounting firm to the cloud. With the recent outbreak of COVID-19, it has become even more appealing as the work-from-home movement is in full force.

While it is a hot buzzword, many do not understand what it means to move to the cloud. Essentially, moving to the cloud means that you do not need to physically be in an office in order to access centralized data. This can be your clients tax returns, documents, spreadsheets, and anything else that in the past you needed to login at your desk in the office to access.

Change is never easy, but during these unprecedented times it may be a good idea for you to migrate your firm to the cloud. Some organizations are opting to dip their toes in the water and do a hybrid solution, where the main server is cloud-based, but the other machines are still physical.

While there are a huge number of advantages to moving to the cloud, there are some cons that are associated with it as well.

To help you decide which is best for your firm, weigh the following pros and cons.

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The pros and cons of moving to the cloud - Accounting Today

It is easy to understand the lure of the public clouds siren call. Theres the flexibility and agility to enable immediate elastic scaling up or down as needed, the tools and services needed for running modern workloads like artificial intelligence and data analytics, the removal of headaches related to deploying and managing vast numbers of systems enterprises in large part no longer want to run their own datacenter infrastructures and the cost efficiencies, with no longer having to pay upfront for hardware and instead leveraging models like pay-per-use.

The benefits of the cloud have been put in even greater focus during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced businesses to accelerate their digital efforts to adapt to a rapidly evolving business environment where most people are working remotely. In addition, businesses are seeing their revenues and budgets shrink in the wake of the public health crisis, driving many of them to look to the cloud to run more of their workloads. Synergy Research Group noted that in the first quarter, while spending on traditional datacenter hardware and software fell 4 percent year-over-year, revenues in the public cloud datacenter infrastructure market grew 3 percent.

Despite all this, the majority of workloads some estimates put it at 70 percent still run in traditional datacenters. There are myriad reasons, from security and compliance concerns to the costs that come with moving some larger applications and data sets to the cloud. While a report by Virtustream a cloud company owned by Dell Technologies last year found that organizations were moving more mission-critical applications to the cloud, the belief among most vendors is that for the foreseeable future, most enterprises will continue to run in this hybrid mode, with some workloads remaining on premises in the datacenter and others running in the public cloud, and in most cases in multiple public clouds.

Given that, a growing trend is to make the movement of workloads and data between on-premises and public cloud easier and faster and to bring cloud-like features to the datacenter. Most recently, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is leveraging its GreenLake platform as the foundation for its efforts and Pure Storage rolled out its Purity 6.0 for FlashArray operating system, with a range of features that are available through its Evergreen subscription model. Oracle earlier this month announced Oracle Cloud@Customer, which is a way to bring the full cloud experience into the datacenter.

VMware also has become a significant player in the hybrid cloud space over the past several years and has a goal to make an enterprises traditional datacenter or private cloud as flexible, efficient and cost-effective as a public cloud.

We are helping our customers make their private cloud as agile, as efficient, as flexible as the public cloud infrastructure, Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of VMwares Networking and Security Business Unit, said at a recent press briefing. This is increasingly important because our customers say that if they dont deliver this level of efficiency, more or more of their internal constituents are going to look to the public cloud. But the public cloud cant always meet the security requirements and the cost requirements or other concerns, data privacy concerns. Having the ability to make your private cloud infrastructure programmatic and efficient is really critical.

VMware began its journey beyond its server virtualization roots and into the software-defined datacenter (SDDC) space when it bought software-defined networking (SDN) startup Nicira in 2012 for $1.26 billion, bringing aboard the technology that would form the basis of its NSX networking platform. Over the next several years it would build on the technology with NSX-T, support for virtual machines (VM), containers and bare-metal infrastructures. VMware created its vRealize management suite, bought VeloCloud for software-defined WAN and two years ago launched is Virtual Cloud Network to enable organizations to connect and secure applications and data as workloads moves outside of the datacenter.

A year ago, the company bought startup Avi Networks, whose technology essentially balance workloads and application delivery both in the cloud and in the datacenter. It was the one-year anniversary of that acquisition that brought Gillis and other VMware officials to speak to the media this week about not only the adoption of VMwares NSX Advanced Load Balancer based in large part on the technology inherited through the Avi deal but also new features in the latest version of the product.

Networking is obviously connectivity that you get from switching and routing, and NSX is known for that. But as weve expanded the NSX portfolio created this family of products we now have the NSX Services-Defined Firewall and the NSX Advance Load Balancer, which gives you all the necessary services you need to fully define a workload and deploy it with a single-click strategy, Gillis said. Thats what motivated the acquisition of Avi. They had built a very unique software architecture. There are other software load balancers on the market, but there is only one software load balancer that has a scale-out architecture, which means you can keep adding little data plans and create one giant logical load balancer. Having that as part of the NSX portfolio has allowed us to really complete this vision of a public cloud experience in your private cloud infrastructure.

VMware not only is integrating the Avi load balancing technology into its own networking portfolio but also in other products, such as its Carbon Black security offerings, automated orchestration tools and Tanzu Kubernetes platform. Since the Avi acquisition, 7,000 traditional hardware-based load balancers have been replaced with VMware software and the customer base for NSX Advanced Load Balancer has grown about 70 percent, from 6,500 companies to more than 15,000. That includes six of the top 10 financial services companies, Gillis said. In addition, VMware has been able to deliver more than a million transactions per second for a single application.

The software load balancer, which runs on standards x86 servers, can scale horizontally in seconds or minutes using the software load balancer rather than the weeks or months needed for hardware appliances. This becomes even more important given the changes being forced on businesses by the coronavirus outbreak.

The first thing we needed to do was just react to a global shift that suddenly everybodys branch office was in their living room, he said. We have a number of customers that are ramping up remote access technologies like VDI virtual desktop infrastructure so having a load balancing solution specifically designed to solve those use cases has been a real win for us and weve been able to help our customers adapt and adjust. The second thing we need to do is stabilize the operation and find some efficiency here. Thats the phase that many customers are in now. COVID, while it presents so many challenges, it also creates opportunity. Smart companies are using this as a time to rethink how we accelerate our digital initiatives and how we can be faster for the future and not be beholden to old legacy infrastructure, and it is infrastructure that requires people to be onsite in buildings. All of those things are things that were leaving behind us and that really has created some uplift for the VMware portfolio and the NSX Advanced Load Balancer in particular.

VMware is putting new features into version 20.1 of NSX Advanced Load Balancer, a platform that includes not only load balancing but also a web application firewall (WAF), application analytics and Kubernetes ingress services in the datacenter and cloud, with the software available for both VMware and non-VMware environments. The new features include enhancements to more easily install global load balancing updates and to offer full integration with Google Cloud Platform and VMwares NSX-T. Security updates include automated Pulse cloud services and case management, WAF threat feeds, while consolidated VMware solutions with vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation. VMwares new architecture for consolidated Kubernetes Ingress Services is aimed at streamlining container deployments for multiple clusters and multiple sites.

The Kubernetes Ingress services, the ability to support modern applications, to have the ability to provide all of those networking services into Kubernetes applications, has been an important part of the product, said Chandra Sekar, a senior director of marketing at VMware who came to the company with Avi. Now, the critical piece here is the ability to interact and integrate with a lot of the newer technology stack as well. Weve always had integrations with vCenter. We have full access integration with NSX-T as well. When the business continuity initiatives started with enterprises that were dealing with the aftermath of COVID, we were able to provide VDI services, with load balancing with VDI services with Horizon [VMwares desktop and application virtualization product] and we also have several integrations with automation frameworks, including vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation. Everythings available in one single platform that can be deployed and managed centrally across different environments.

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The Style Of Cloud Networking In The Corporate Datacenter - The Next Platform

While the Covid-19 pandemic is expected to disrupt the demand for data center equipment this year, data center capex will grow at a 6% CAGR to reach just over $200 billion over the next five years.

A report by Dell'Oro Group said data center capex, which includes capex for servers and other data center infrastructure equipment, growth will be a mixed bag depending on the customer segment. The cloud, which accounts for more than 60% of the worldwide data center capex, will continue to flourish when compared to enterprise/on-premise data center deployments.

Telco edge data centers could emerge over the long-term as telcos build their edge compute services and applications.

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The coronavirus pandemic has hit several industry verticals hard over the past five months, including brick-and-mortar retail, travel, hospitality and small-to-medium sized business, which led to them reining in their IT spending this year.

On the flip side, Covid-19 has led to some organizations accelerating their digital transformations, which includes putting data, workloads and applications in the cloud. Dell'Oro's report said that as enterprises look to conserve capital spending, the public cloud, which has a flexible and consumption-based infrastructure, could help meet the growing demand for remote work and distance learning.

"The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing recession may have the long-lasting effect of accelerating the permanent migration of certain industries and workloads to the cloud," according to Dell'Oro.

While Microsoft reported its earnings on Wednesday, the other major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Project, will be conducting their earnings calls over the coming weeks. Microsoft Azure's revenue growth was 47% in the fourth quarter compared to 59% in the third quarter.

RELATED: Hyperscale data center count reaches 541 with 176 more in the works

Dell'Oro said the top-four U.S. cloud service providersAmazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoftwere well positioned to continue their momentum of expansion over the next five years.

"Servers will continue to be consolidated in fewer mega cloud data centers that could potentially provide greater capacity than the same number of servers spread out across thousands of enterprise data centers," according to Dell'Oro Group.

Those top four U.S. cloud service providers have been prolonging the life of their servers to lower server depreciation expenses while maintaining the reliability of their server fleets. Last year, Arista Networks saw an impact on its fourth quarter earnings due to declining switch revenue from an unnamed cloud provider.

Also on the trend front, Dell'Oro Group said the Intel server processor refresh cycles have historically influenced IT spending.

"While the major cloud service providers typically ramp server capacity outside of the processor refresh cycle, the upcoming Intel 10 nm Whitley server platform refresh due later this year could generate an uplift on server spending. Viable alternatives to Intel processors, AMD EPYC and ARM, for server and storage system applications are starting to materialize in certain markets," according to Dell'Oro Group.

Dell'Oro Group also cited open source groups coming together to share and standardize best practices in the design of sustainable data center infrastructure as a factor going forward.

"The Open Compute Project (OCP), in particular, has introduced various technological innovations in the areas of server and server connectivity, rack architecture, and networking switches, which could shape the future development of data center infrastructure," Dell'Oro Group said.

Facebook launched OCP nine years ago as an open-source hardware initiative to drive the deployment of web-scale operations and services. OCP has thousands of engineers from close to 200 member organizations working on more energy-efficient hardware equipment for the likes of hyperscale data centers and large service providers.

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Report: Despite Covid-19 disruption in 2020, data center capex poised to hit more than $200B over next five years - FierceTelecom

Posey's Tips & Tricks

With cloud suites like Microsoft 365 scattering user data across multiple apps and services, application-aware backups and restorations are due for a surge in renewed interest.

As someone who has worked in IT since the early 1990s, I've seen a lot of changes over the years. The industry is almost unrecognizable compared to when I first started out. This is especially true for backups.

Early in my career, making a backup meant putting a tape into a drive just before you went home for the day. The backup job typically started late at night when nobody was in the office and completed just prior to everyone's arrival the next morning.

These prehistoric backups were file backups. The reason we ran them late at night was because the backup software of the time was incapable of backing up open files. Since the jobs ran late at night, nobody should have been logged in, so theoretically there weren't any open files that would disrupt the backup.

The really crazy thing to think about is that the concept of application-aware backups did not exist back then (or if it did exist, I wasn't exposed to it). Application awareness was never an issue until the organization that I worked for adopted Microsoft Exchange Server.

Unlike most of the other applications of the day, Exchange had to be backed up in a very specific way because of the way the Exchange Server databases worked. Creating a file-level backup of an Exchange Server simply wasn't an option. If a file-level backup of the Exchange Server even managed to complete, the backup would have been corrupt.

Seemingly overnight, application-aware backups became a big thing.

A big part of selecting a backup application was making sure it would be able to work with the organization's applications. Today, of course, most backup vendors design their software to work with all of the most popular business applications. Even so, I think we are probably about to see a renewed interest in application-aware backups, but for a completely different reason than before.

This time around, I think application awareness is going to be more closely associated with the data-restoration process than with the backup process. Let me explain my reasoning.

In the past, commercial applications, especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, had a very cozy relationship with their data. Consider Exchange Server. All of that messaging data is stored in a series of databases residing on the Exchange mailbox servers.

Of course, there are plenty of applications that store their data in external databases, but even this data tends to be application-centric. For example, Microsoft System Center applications such as Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager store data in a SQL Server database. Although the SQL Server itself may store data that is unrelated to the System Center applications, the databases used by the System Center products are reserved exclusively for that product's use.

The thing I find interesting, however, is that cloud applications are increasingly scattering their data across a wide range of applications and services. Microsoft Teams, for example, is part of Microsoft 365 and leverages some of the other Microsoft 365 applications for data storage. Some of the Teams data is stored in Exchange, some is stored in SharePoint and some is stored elsewhere.

So think about the Teams architecture from a backup standpoint. Any backup application that is able to back up Microsoft 365 should theoretically be able to back up Teams -- or any of the other Microsoft 365 applications, for that matter. However, performing a restoration may prove to be a more complex operation. Unless a backup application happens to be "Teams-aware," an administrator would have to know all of the various locations in which Teams stores its data in order to do a successful restoration.

This problem isn't unique to Teams. It applies to all of the Microsoft 365 applications.

This is why I think that application awareness is going experience a renewed interest. It's one thing to be able to back up Microsoft 365, but it's quite another to be able to restore data from an individual Microsoft 365 application.

So far, application-aware restorations haven't been all that big of an issue for Microsoft 365. Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive tend to be among the most popular Office applications, and these also happen to be the applications that are commonly supported by backup products. As the other Microsoft 365 applications gain traction, however, I think there will likely be an increased demand for backup vendors to enable granular restorations for those applications.

About the Author

Brien Posey is a 16-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.

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Is Application Awareness on the Cusp of a Renaissance? - Redmondmag.com

FORT COLLINS, Colo., July 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --DH2i, the leading provider of multi-platform Software Defined Perimeter and Smart Availability software, today announced it will present a live webinar titled, "How to Mitigate Microsoft SQL Server Costs Amidst Pandemic-Ravaged Budgets."

When: Wednesday, August 5, 11:00 am 11:30 am Pacific Time (2:00 pm 2:30 pm Eastern Time)

Why Attend:When it comes to supporting the organic growth of an organization, the SQL Server team's role seems pretty straightforward. Just spin up a new VM, set up a new physical box, or expand the organization's cloud footprint. That's not exactly the reality for the DBAs and other team members working on the front lines, though. There is often an elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge because they know it won't go over well with upper management. That unfortunate reality is the unmanageable growth in SQL Server deployments and costs. This is a difficult and expensive problem to fix, and especially in the face of a pandemicno organization has any excess budget to invest in a solution.

But what if a solution enabled consolidation AND cost-savings? Not only that, but what if you could also unlock peak high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) with this solutionall without Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC)?

Join DH2i's Connor Cox for a webinar introducing DH2i's DxEnterprise. Through a brief presentation and live demo, you'll learn how DxEnterprise can improve your SQL Server environment by allowing you to:

Learn more and register here:https://dh2i.com/how-to-mitigate-sql-server-costs-amidst-pandemic-ravaged-budgets/

Tweet this: @DH2ito Address How to Mitigate @Microsoft#SQLServerCosts Amidst Pandemic-Ravaged Budgets https://dh2i.com/how-to-mitigate-sql-server-costs-amidst-pandemic-ravaged-budgets/ #Consolidation#HighAvailability#HA#DisasterRecovery#DR#LowerCosts

About DH2iDH2i Companyis the leading provider of multi-platform Software Defined Perimeter and Smart Availability software for Windows and Linux. DH2i software products DxOdyssey and DxEnterprise enable customers to create anentire IT infrastructure that is "always-secure and always-on." To learn more, please visit: http://www.dh2i.com, call: 800-380-5405 or +44 20 3318 9204, or email: [emailprotected].

DH2i Company 2020. DH2i, Smart Availability, DxEnterprise, DxOdyssey, DxConsole, DxHADR, DxTransfer, DxCollect and InstanceMobility are trademarks of DH2i Company. All other brand or product names contained in this press release may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

PR Contact:Nicole GormanCorporate Communications / PR DH2iM: 508-397-0131[emailprotected]

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DH2i to Address How to Mitigate Microsoft SQL Server Costs Amidst Pandemic-Ravaged Budgets - PRNewswire