From small, 10-man outfits right through to organisations with thousands of employees, businesses of all sizes are moving their data onto the cloud and benefitting from this type of storage.
Why? Because cloud storage can help you save money, reduce data loss and scale infrastructure as you grow.
But it isn't all plain sailing. If you're thinking of moving your data onto the cloud, you need to know some basic information.
Why cloud storage is important
It can save you money
Office space, hardware and maintenance are all huge costs that quickly drain your budget, but moving all of your data into the cloud can potentially save you money.
Some of the areas in which you may see savings are with IT equipment and IT maintenance fees. By passing the responsibility of running and managing your infrastructure onto a service provider, you may be able to reduce your IT overhead.
Reduce your fixed costs
If you store your data the traditional way, you typically deal with two major headaches: underestimating and overestimating how much storage you need. Underestimate and you'll end up scrambling to buy more servers before yours reach maximum capacity. Overestimate and you'll waste a huge chunk of your budget that could've been put to better use. Fixed costs can be reduced with cloud storage. You can quickly scale storage up or down, depending on your needs.
Reduce risk of data loss
If there's an incident at a typical office - such as a minor flood occurs - the biggest loss will be from damaged servers. With cloud storage, your data is hosted offsite with your provider. It will be safe from all onsite fires, theft, natural disasters and acts of God.
Increase team productivity and morale
Flexible hours and/or working from home is a great way to keep your employees productive and happy. Cloud storage promotes productivity by enabling your team to access important files and documents from anywhere: at the office, at a client’s site, at home or via a mobile device.
Challenges of moving to cloud storage
While storing your organisation’s data in the cloud can be great, there are a few challenges you need to be aware of.
You're reliant on the internet
If your office internet connection does go down for, say, half a day, you'll lose half a day's productivity. You’re reliant on an internet connection to be able to access your files. No internet? No files.
You have reduced control
When your provider has an outage and you can't access your data, you are reliant upon your cloud storage provider to help you, which can take longer than you’d expect.
It can be slow
Cloud storage is marginally slower than its physical counterpart. Since you are accessing your data via the internet, there will be some delay in comparison to accessing your data that is hosted locally on a file server. Provided you have a fast internet connection that can support your entire network, this generally won’t be a problem.
Three keys to successfully making the move to a cloud storage provider
Schedule the migration after-hours
Migrating your data can take time. For example, when moving your data onto Google Drive, one of the popular cloud storage solutions, it's recommended that you transfer 5,000 files at a time. If your organisation has, say, 25,000 files in total, it's going to take a fair chunk of time to move everything across from your file server.
That's why you should migrate your data after-hours. This will ensure there'll be no disruption to your employees' workday.
Use an IT service provider to make the process painless
A common roadblock people hit is transferring data file permissions or, in simple terms, transferring the hierarchy that decides who can access what.
If you have a lot of files with a complex permissions hierarchy stored on your servers, things can get messy when attempting to re-assign everything in the cloud.
Use an experienced IT service provider that understands cloud storage to ensure that you quickly and easily transfer permissions from your file server to the cloud.
Keep your people happy
Before you make the transition, make sure you give your team plenty of notice on what's going to happen. This will give them time to adapt to the new technologies and learn the new procedures.
Do you need help moving from a file server to a cloud storage provider? We can help you make the move to a cloud storage provider. Call us on 1300 562 886 or contact us via this page.