Rye Austin, Sales and Marketing Director at Core, is used to talking to people about transitioning to cloud-based services. But over the past year or so, he’s observed a significant alteration in the way that conversation is going.
“Today, people don’t want to put servers in their offices. Even before the very recent huge drive towards remote working, the current climate was changing. Having on-premises environments is high risk and expensive and needs more maintenance. It doesn’t make sense for most customers now, so everyone’s looking at the cloud”, Austin explained.
Indeed, for any startup the way forward is obvious.
But for complex organisations with legacy systems it’s not so straightforward, and preserving business continuity requires expert project management to enact the change smoothly.
Everything depends on the starting point
[caption id="attachment_27181" align="alignright" width="200"]
Rye Austin[/caption]
“Every organisation has got different systems, different data and different needs. So we look to understand how an organisation would make the absolute most of the cloud. And that means looking at the systems they’ve got, because there are different levels of the cloud and different ways of doing things.
“So for one organisation, they might choose to have email hosted in a SaaS style solution that makes the most sense for email. Other systems like document management, they might choose a different platform, and other workloads might be set up on Azure or similar.” he continued, illustrating the complexity and consultative nature of the change management process involved.
While being a Microsoft Gold partner and expert, Core’s independence is a critical asset in putting together a plan which best meets the needs of each client effectively on their journey to full cloud-based operations. “We see a lot of vendors that are trying a kind ‘land grab’, to get customers onto their platform”, said Austin. But this isn’t serving customers well, nor demonstrating the transformative potential of cloud-based working:
“Just putting the same stuff in the cloud and doing things the same way, then ticking the box and saying we’re done, is really not the best way of doing it. Sales people have targets to meet, and might be looking to meet targets to win organisations to take that first step into the cloud.
