Cloud Services
Cloud computing has gone from being something that nobody understood, to a buzz word that everyone was talking about and now it is fast becoming one of the most influential technologies in place today.
As internet speeds are increasing the cloud is becoming the most efficient way of hosting your applications by far – whether it’s the handling of email communications, the housing and management of your companies CRM system or simply the way in which you collaborate amongst each other the cloud is almost always the first point of call when it comes to setting things up.
Why cloud computing and the cloud in general is so beneficial
Cloud computing really embodies everything that IT has always stood for – it is the pooling together of resources creating easy management, economies of scale and a feature rich and accessible environment.
Translated into business terms this simply means that with cloud computing you get a lot for your money, you have no maintenance worries and you always have the latest and greatest features available to you, without the technical overhead of upgrades, support, backup, recovery, licences etc etc
Cloud application consulting
There are many services and applications that can be moved to the cloud with very little effort – in fact there are some companies that start off in the cloud and therefore have no transition at all.
However, there are also services – especially legacy services – that are not cloud ready and as a result drag companies down where they would otherwise be far more efficient.
In real terms this means that whilst some components of a company can be cloud driven and can benefit from the many advantages that cloud computing brings with it, other services are stuck running on in house legacy systems – these services therefore do not have any of the advantages that would be offered by cloud computing technologies.
The big problem here is that because all of these services tend to rely on each other in a typical business environment the legacy systems tend to render the benefits of the modern cloud based systems almost useless.
This is where cloud application consulting comes in to play – it enables businesses to look at all of their applications, across the board, and bring everything up to the same standard in terms of the technologies that they are running on. This may involve decommissioning and replacing legacy applications with their modern equivalents as well as upgrading legacy systems so that they can communicate with their modern counterparts.
The result is that every application in use within a company ends up running on equal technologies and there for all of those applications come with the advantages that cloud computing can offer.
This allows the business to take full advantage of modern technology and allows them to garner the greatest benefit possible from these technologies.
In addition, due to the explosion of Cloud based applications picking the right solution for your business can be a daunting task if you don’t have the experience with the platform or don’t have someone to guide you in the right direction.
Circle Business Consulting have been early adopters of Cloud technologies, and have helped a number of customers deploy cloud based applications, we therefore have a wealth of experience and knowledge, about the features, benefits and pitfalls of various technologies over others. Our Cloud Consulting offering involves doing a features and benefit analysis on a number of solutions and mapping them against your business requirements, we are able to investigate features and functionality, ease of use, agility, security, look into the update roadmap, do research and analysis into what the market and other industry forums think of the product and what the reputation of the product is.
There are many factors involved with choosing a Cloud hosted Application, let CircleBC help you navigate the minefield and make better informed decisions with the help of a consulting firm that is vendor agnostic and will review all the solutions on the market, and not what suits our bottom line.
Circle BC can assist you with all your Microsoft needs, wether it be managing your Microsoft Windows and Office desktop environment, where we can provide operating system upgrades and license management. If you have an on premise instance of Microsoft Exchange, and need an upgrade to the latest version or support of that environment, our certified engineers would be a perfect fit.
If you are considering migrating to the cloud, then Office 365 is flexible and scalable ensuring that you only use and pay for what you need. Once Office 365 is deployed, we can provide Sharepoint and Lync services.
We can provide you with consultation on the right product for your needs, we can then assist you with migration of the product and support. So you can rely on the team at Circle BC for services across the entire Microsoft Product Suite.
If you are still running on-premise email hosting, including exchange servers, or local Pop3 or IMAP email hosting and you are looking for a cheap and reliable alternative then Google Apps and GMAIL could be the answer to your problems. Google Apps provides a complete business productivity suite that included GMAIL for email hosting, integrated calendars, collaboration tools including Google Hangouts formerly known as Google Chat, Google Drive for cloud storage, Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheet use, and furthermore it is all available and accessible via the cloud. Meaning that wherever you go, or whichever computer, tablet or phone you access, you will be able to access your content or emails by logging into a secure web based portal. There are no costly servers to maintain or buy licenses for, no upgrades, or worrying about breakdowns, Google will manage all of that for you in their enterprise grade data centres, all of this can be accessed for a small fee per user per month, meaning that the expenditure is all operational expenses instead of a capital expense, meaning that it is much easier to track and monitor costs allowing your business to forecast better. Also, if you company grows and expands, you just keep adding users to your account, it really is that easy.
CircleBC can assist you with your next Google Apps or Gmail migration, and can assist you with the backup and migration of your existing emails to the new platform.
