Your IT infrastructure runs day after day processing orders, shipping products, and streamlining processes. When it was first installed, it provided some great competitive advantages. You had it all thought out carefully to increase efficiency and staff productivity while reducing costs.

However, as time goes by, technology advances and all these advantages disappear. In fact, an aging infrastructure will not only cost you more, but it will permit your business to be outpaced by competitors. In its lifespan, your IT network will cycle through “Great IT”, to “OK IT”, to “We need to spend more money and upgrade this now!” However, there is a way to break out of this expensive cycle – move to the Cloud.

When you reach the point of “OK IT”, moving to cloud services is a great solution to a host of problems you are experiencing.

So, you may be asking, “How do I know when it’s time to move to the cloud?” We are glad you asked.

1. (EOL) End of Life or (EOSL) End of Service Life hardware

The day will come when your OEM hardware/software provider will stop making and supporting your equipment. This increases your support and maintenance costs.

2. You are Experiencing Increased Expense and Downtime

Downtime is expensive. According to Gartner, The average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute. Labor and operating costs need to be paid regardless of network availability. Not only is it expensive monetarily but customer memories are long and it will effect your brand. Recovering your brand from falling short of customer expectations takes longer that the downtime itself.

Check out our blog on 5 Ways Downtime will Cost Your Business.

3. You are Manually Inputing Static IP Addressing

This topic is a little more on the technical side. Each piece of equipment you own has what is called an IP address. This address identifies it to other equipment on a network.

In the past, addresses were all set by hand and kept track of with a spreadsheet. Today they are set automatically by servers using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). This enables you to assign an IP address and configuration, based on your policies, for every network device. If you’re having to set all this by hand, it’s a sign that your network is out of date.

4. Physical Signs – It’s hot and noisy in the server room

Can you fry an egg on your server?  OK, that’s an exaggeration but a server running very hot is an indication it’s not in good health. It could be full of dust or have failing components. Increased noise is another telltale sign of aging equipment.

By the way, if you can fry an egg on your server, don’t forget the bacon!

5. Compatibility Issues are Cropping Up

If you have to use workarounds to update and configure software, you most likely have legacy infrastructure in need of upgrading.

6. Increased System Management Time

Are you spending an increasing amount of time managing computer hardware and software instead of your business? If you are, you should know that this will only increase as time goes by.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. If you’re experiencing some or all of these symptoms, it’s time to move to the cloud.

With cloud computing, you don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware.

Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet.

What are the Benefits of Cloud Services?

Trade capital expense for variable expense– Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can pay only when you consume computing resources, and pay only for how much you consume.

Benefit from massive economies of scale– By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay as-you-go prices.

Stop guessing capacity– Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often end up either sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little capacity as you need and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.

Increase speed and agility– In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.

Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers– Focus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers.

Go global in minutes– Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost.

For more information on cloud computing, download this AWS Overview.

Responza IT Cloud management and support enables you to concentrate on doing what you do best.

Running your business.

Contact Responza today to set up a FREE Information Technology Audit.