Info Advantage Blog

Today, more and more businesses are opting to move their unified communications (UC) to the cloud. Businesses that move their UC to the cloud can experience a host of benefits; lower costs, more flexibility, and simplicity. If you are one of the many businesses looking to make the switch to the cloud, here are a few tips that will help your migration run seamlessly.

Gradual Change-Over

Many businesses are able to recognize the benefits of a cloud-based UC system, but are worried that a transition may cut into valuable company time. If the downtime of a transition to the cloud is holding you back, consider implementing the switch gradually. Start with one department that can benefit from the transition, and allow them to work with the new system to make sure it works properly. This way, employees can ease into the system without experiencing transition downtime.

Check Your Bandwidth

When making the transition to a cloud-based UC system, many businesses may overlook their current IT environment, which can cause issues with speed and performance. If you are planning to implement a UC system in the cloud, make sure that you have a stable, reliable internet service. It’s also important that you have some sort of backup in case the internet connection is down to limit any interruptions should the internet go down.

Test Your New System

Like with any new system, it will take time before you are fully able to efficiently use your cloud communications. While the transition may appear to be seamless, there may be a few unexpected elements that can cause issues down the road. Rather than waiting until the issues become a problem, experts recommend to test the system throughout the duration of the cloud migration. Testing the system will allow you to create benchmarks and predict patterns for future use. It will also allow you to ensure that the overall user experience is as simple and easy to use for you and your employees as possible.

Constantly Monitor

While a cloud UC system is much less likely to go down than the traditional in-house communications system, there are still issues that could arise as your employees begin to use the service. In order to be successful, businesses should continually monitor their cloud-based UC system for any issues that may come up after the migration. Monitoring your system also allows you to get a full picture of how well the system works, and can help you decide if any changes need to be made.

If your business is still on the fence about the cloud, you should make up your mind soon. The cloud is an investment that can help your business improve operations, cut costs, and boost productivity. It’s inevitable that most businesses will use the cloud, so it’s not a question of if, but when. Why not take this opportunity to get a head start on your competition with a cloud computing solution?

When shopping for a cloud solution, you’re routinely bombarded with a ton of impressive-sounding features that act as selling points. One feature that you’ve probably come across, autoscaling, may not be able to fully deliver on its perceived promises.

The promise of autoscaling for your cloud solution is pretty straightforward. Somehow, workloads automatically know how to scale in size the specific amount of resources needed in order to perform a task. The idea here is that this feature is always-on and always monitoring network activity, thus alleviating bottlenecking issues and traffic spikes without any human intervention.

If only this were true.

In actuality, achieving autoscaling to this degree requires a whole lot of human oversight and technical know-how, thus, eliminating the “auto” part of the scaling equation. ITProPortal explains, “To create a truly automated and self-healing architecture that scales with little or no human intervention requires custom scripts and templates that can take months for a skilled team to get right, and many organizations have neither the time nor those resources to make it work.”

Instead, a better approach is to have human oversight of your cloud solution. This is achieved by entrusting IT administrators to respond to increased network traffic with intelligent scaling decisions.

Having oversight like this for a cloud platform is important for any business, especially when it comes to the unpredictable nature of network computing. For example, if your website is hosted in the cloud and your business is featured on a spot in the local news, then your website may crash from a spike in unexpected visits. Also, any solution connected to the Internet is at risk of being overwhelmed by a DDoS attack. Proper oversight of a network by an administrator will allow them to take needed scaling actions to safeguard against such an attack.

However, having a dedicated IT technician constantly overseeing your network is still a bit of a stretch for an SMB. If you’ve spent any time with an IT technician, you might recall just how busy they are. ITProPortal explains: “They don’t have time for this either. Couple it with the fact that they are chastised when systems are under-provisioned or fail, that re-starting a system may land it on an unfortunate server filled with noisy neighbors, and that all of this is happening at the scale of dozens or hundreds of servers at a time – and this feels like a great time to just over-provision everything and leave well enough alone.”

Therefore, in view of true autoscaling being difficult-to-impossible to achieve, and onboarding a new IT technician to oversee your servers being out of reach for the average SMB, the most reasonable and effective option left is a managed cloud service. Managed IT provides the best of both worlds; you get oversight of your cloud solution by having an automated system in place to catch any traffic and performance abnormalities, along with a human technician to make the proper scaling adjustments as soon as they’re notified. This affordable option is how Info Advantage manages our clients’ technology. To find out how you can take advantage of managed IT, call us at (585) 254-8710.