The holiday season is wrapping up quickly and I hope yours was full of joy.
The last week of the year is a great time to focus on finishing up your business plan for 2018. For us, that means reviewing our 2018 plan one more time to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After further review, we made a few more tweaks, and then everyone agreed that we’re ready to go!
Along with planning for our future, we’re also reviewing the technology of our clients and discussing the best direction for them. Many of our clients are moving some of their servers to our Cloud hosting facility. And many others are moving their main business applications to the software developer’s Cloud offering.
There are many good reasons to move certain business applications to the Cloud. There’s no doubt that avoiding the capital outlay for a bunch of servers is a major factor helping justify the decision, but many other costs may go away as well. Electricity, maintenance, and the ability to expense the monthly payments really help in figuring out the ROI for a “cloud vs. on-premise” decision.
On the other hand, a few things must be managed much more carefully when the Cloud is involved. Internet bandwidth and the speed of problem resolution are of the utmost importance.
In the day-to-day life of an IT support company, most of the critical issues we deal with are related to the speed of the Internet and/or the speed of Cloud (or hosted) applications. We use several tools to troubleshoot the problem, and to determine exactly which device is hogging all the Internet speed. The culprit is usually a tablet, phone, or laptop that’s being used to stream live shows, YouTube, or music.
What’s interesting is that most business managers don’t even know that these things are happening on their network! (Whether or not they should be is an entirely different conversation.)
Internet connectivity and bandwidth are a very precious commodity. Let’s plan and protect it as best we can to get the best possible results from this amazing technology.
The year 2018 will bring amazing opportunities and I, for one, am excited about it. I hope you are too!
Related: 5 Steps to Create and Execute a Business Technology Plan
