How to upgrade: Are the answers blowin’ in the wind?

The answer, my friend, is... harder to find than ever.

With the massive shift in future technology, now is the time to invest in smart research, before you consider investing in any technology that locks you in for a three, four or five year commitment.

It is now well recognised that not all solutions are ready to be moved to the cloud, especially here in Australia where bandwidth for data is too expensive and too slow. Until the majority of your staff have access to the National Broadband Network or other economical high-speed data connections, some of your systems may still need to be local.

When considering a shift to the cloud, the big questions are:

• What is ready to move now or in the near future?
• What has shifted or is shifting that simplifies our environment without complicating our work processes?
• Will it demand re-training of our staff in basic business functions or can it be business as usual?
• Whose systems are stable enough for us to adopt – given the massive “oops!” we observed recently with Amazon dropping the ball for three days?
• Is there any strategic benefit to moving now?
• Is there a cost benefit in there anywhere?
• Will our broadband support it without a cost blow out?

A warning to smaller businesses planning to grow; if the barrier to entry is low, such as small licensing costs for a single user or few users, consider what will happen to pricing as your business grows. We are seeing some cases where the low cost of entry is later offset by very high costs as the business requires five or more licenses. This can be the case with cloud CRM or ERP systems, so I recommend you pause and consider the shape of your business down-the-track, as well as your immediate requirements.

A huge advantage of using cloud solutions is that it can remove the upfront cost of infrastructure. This is appealing at the point where your organisation is growing and cash is tight, and it also enables your organisation to be mobile and nimble. The flipside is that you may need the infrastructure of servers anyway, which means you wind up paying for: the parts, the expensive cloud application, plus the infrastructure and associated management of it.

So are there any cloud solutions that are worth a look? Yes, there certainly are...

The more common the need for a program, the more likely there is to be a scalable, cost-effective online solution. Email and standard office applications fall into this category. Soon Microsoft will have its Office 365 offering live; it is on beta testing now and early reports are positive. Early adopters of the Microsoft hosted email and SharePoint tools through Telstra’s T-Suite seem to be in agreement that the systems work well and have a good price point and billing method with reasonable performance – all without requiring staff to be re-trained.

The key for your business is to ensure the research is done and well-budgeted plans are developed for all of your systems before the investment is made on the wrong solution for a component. Now, more than ever, is not the time to be blowin’ your budget in the winds of fate.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.