The cloud can improve your business in a handful of practical ways, and none of them is about technology for its own sake. Once a system has moved off a server in the office, staff can reach it from wherever they are working, backups stop depending on one person’s memory, a hardware failure stops being your emergency, and the cost becomes a monthly figure you can plan around. What the move will not do is make slow or awkward software any better.
This article describes what changes day to day after an existing business system has been moved to a cloud platform such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). For a balanced list of advantages and drawbacks, see the pros and cons of moving your business to the cloud. For the decision itself, see self-hosted or cloud hosted.
What changes for the people who use the system
They can reach it without going through the office. With a server in the building, anyone working elsewhere connects through the office broadband line, usually over a VPN (an encrypted link into the office network) or by remote control of a PC left switched on at a desk. After the move a web-based system simply has an address, protected by a sign-in that asks for a second proof of identity, such as a code from a phone app.
The office stops being a single point of failure. A power cut, a burst pipe or a broadband fault at the office no longer stops people elsewhere from working. The same goes for an office move, which otherwise means a weekend of carrying a server across town and hoping it starts.
There are fewer mornings when the server is down. A cloud provider replaces failing hardware without involving you, and a system can be set up to restart itself on healthy equipment.
One thing may get worse. A desktop program that exchanges a great deal of data with its database will feel slower for office staff if the database moves away and the program stays on their PCs. That needs to be found in testing, before the move and not after it.
What changes for whoever looks after the system
Hardware leaves the list of worries. Disks, power supplies, the battery backup and the temperature of the server room become someone else’s job.
Backups run themselves, and restores can be tested. Backups are taken on a schedule and stored away from the system. A restore can be rehearsed on a temporary copy, so you know how long recovery would take before you ever need it.
Problems show up before users report them. Cloud platforms come with monitoring that can send an alert when a disk is filling, memory is short or the system has stopped answering.
Updates carry less risk. Before a security update or a new version is applied, the server can be copied in its current state. If the update causes trouble, the copy is the way back.
Supplier access is controlled per person. Each developer or support engineer can have a named account limited to what the job needs, with a record of what was done and a switch to turn it off. That replaces the shared remote-access password that many office servers rely on.
Two jobs appear that did not exist before: watching the monthly bill, and looking after the accounts that control the cloud environment. Both need a named owner.
What changes for the budget
The purchase of a new server every few years disappears, along with the argument about whether the old one can last another twelve months. In its place is a monthly charge. Finance teams generally find that easier to plan, though whether it is lower depends on the system and on how carefully the new environment is sized.
The cost also becomes visible system by system. When each application is labelled in the bill, you can see what the old quoting tool costs to keep running and decide whether it is still worth it. On a shared office server that figure was never known.
Buying and renting are treated differently in the accounts, so ask your accountant how the change will affect yours.
What becomes possible afterwards
Some of the larger gains come later, from things that were impractical on a single office server.
- A full copy of the system for testing or training. It can be created for a week and deleted afterwards. That makes upgrades of the database or the application’s platform much safer, because they can be tried on a real copy first.
- Reports that do not slow the live system. Heavy reporting can run against a copy of the database.
- Links to other systems. A system that is reachable in a controlled way over the internet is easier to connect to an accounts package, a courier or a customer portal than one behind the office firewall.
- New services alongside the old system. Search, document handling and AI features can be added as separate components without buying hardware.
What does not improve by itself
Slow software stays slow. If a screen takes twenty seconds because of the way it queries the database, it will take about twenty seconds in the cloud too. Slow software is fixed in the code and the database, and fixing it before the move usually means a smaller server afterwards.
Out-of-support software stays out of support. Moving an old version of Windows Server or SQL Server to a new home does not bring back its security fixes. The move is a good moment to upgrade, since a new environment is being built anyway.
Security still needs attention. The provider protects the data centre. The accounts, the settings and the data remain your responsibility.
Dependence on one supplier can simply change shape. Make sure the cloud account is opened in your company’s name and that you hold the administrator access, with your supplier given access to it. If the account belongs to the supplier, so in practice does control of your system.
How to tell whether it worked
Write down a few figures before the move and look at them again three months afterwards:
- hours of unplanned downtime over the past year;
- how long a restore from backup takes, and when one was last tested;
- how long it takes to give a new starter access, and to remove a leaver;
- time spent each month keeping the server going;
- the total monthly cost, counted on the same basis before and after;
- how many support calls were about access or speed.
If you are still planning the move, our cloud migration service page explains how the switch-over is rehearsed and how the monthly cost is forecast in advance.