A little over a decade ago, when I was early in my IT career, “going paperless” was a trend buzzing in the small business world. Leaders of document management tools proclaimed they would put an end to paper and toner expenses. Today, we continue to see many printers and the printed document is ubiquitous in most offices.
Years ago, we started hearing a lot about “going serverless.” A widespread misconception that surfaced from this shift was the idea that with the wave of a credit card at a few cloud services we could upload all our documents to the cloud and turn off our server forever. Unfortunately, going serverless is not always as simple, quick and affordable as it is marketed to be.
Do not get me wrong, going serverless is achievable and produces great results in most cases. When it is not feasible, the aim should be to reduce dependency on local servers as much as possible. Such dependency often causes problems like an internet outage at the office that results in every remote worker not being able to function. Or the server goes down preventing employees from printing, emailing, opening documents, or accessing accounting software. Problems like these can go away with Microsoft 365 hosted email, file storage and sharing and printing managed by a cloud service etc.
When making the shift towards a serverless business it is important to review the security measures you need to put in place. All too often cloud security is not taken seriously and not enough time and resources are allocated to the process. For most businesses the biggest area of neglect is data security. How do you ensure that data is securely stored and only accessible to the right people on the right devices?
Choosing the simplest and cheaper cloud solution is a mistake we witness again and again — a mistake that introduces big risks.
Often the cost of migrating to the cloud is compared to the past investment of server-based projects and server lifecycle costs. Deciding on price alone will create more problems down the road.
It is not comparing apples to apples and while going to the cloud reduces capital expenditures and some large costly projects, it is not necessarily cheaper and that is usually a good thing. The main reason for this is due to the result of having the best cloud services. Your cloud stack can do more than your on-premises server was doing. As a managed service provider, we can implement more mature security measures like multi-factor authentication. We can enable employees to work from anywhere where they have an internet connection and from nearly any device. Most importantly, we can secure the company data on those devices regardless of where they are.
A shift to the cloud can eliminate many little problems while introducing more functionality and more productivity. But we can only do so with the right cloud services.