Hybrid Cloud Solutions - The Right Time to Move On?
In a week where the climate is becoming a key focus with the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, is now the right time for businesses to move onto a hybrid cloud solution? The answer is not always clear. In this blog, we will discuss what your organisation should consider when looking at your options for a new cloud infrastructure.
Could Cloud help reduce our Carbon Footprint?
A hybrid IT platform gives businesses the freedom to run workloads in the cloud or on-premises, depending on what is most efficient for their needs. As more companies are looking at how they can reduce carbon footprint and CO₂ emissions, it’s important that you consider all your options before embarking into a new infrastructure solution. Think about this like consolidating more options than just traditional on-site servers and local storage drives. In 2020, we seen an increase in companies moving email, voice, and server workloads to the cloud to support the remote working and potential office relocations. With the benefits of helping towards reducing their carbon footprint in some cases by *60% when including vendor applications and voice servers, additionally no longer having the large capital cost for upgrading server infrastructure, providing more compute power quickly, with latest OS and license and ability to have a pay as you go model which is bespoke to their business needs at that time.
Cloud Migrations Can Reduce CO2 Emissions by Nearly 60 million Tons a Year, According to New Research from Accenture
With many companies refocusing on digital transformation within business, it’s time to understand the true business needs as it relates to office and remote working capabilities and your carbon footprint. As your workforce spreads to new workspaces, the data and applications key to your business success moves with it. To support this workload and critical data on premise, in the cloud, in third party data centres. The IFB hybrid cloud solution delivers secure data storage for all your server infrastructure and applications that can be accessed anytime and anywhere by your employees or partners, which means you don’t lose control over any IT resources like, servers, applications and services hosted on a virtual machine.
What public Cloud provider should I use?
Over the last 18 months, we established businesses who had servers and applications hosted in the cloud, adapted to the new way of working quicker, enabling them time to focus on the security of each user working remotely. With many IT managers looking at a hybrid cloud solution utilising Microsoft’s Office365, AWS, Azure, GCP and IFB Cloud supported by a managed VPN or IFB Cloud Connect connection, you can use these public and private clouds depending on your business requirements.
The IFB Cloud platform helps in providing a predictable monthly cost based on the resources required by the business on a highly secure environment, with built in security measures ensuring best practices are followed to protect your company data and applications. In IFB Cloud, we include our data backup platform which not only delivers a trusted secure backup of your operational data, but it also plays a key part in business resilience planning and strategy. We do this for you securely and regardless of where your data is - including other cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft’s Office365 - in fact from any connected device.
IFB Cloud offers: Cost-effective, Reliable, Highly Secure, and robust environment.
IFB Hybrid Cloud Solution offers: Business Resilience Planning Strategy, Data Backup Platform for Office365 and AWS, IP Telephony, Cloud Connect Connectivity and added security for endpoint protection with MFA.
Working with IFB means you do not need to invest in and maintain your own-in-house hardware and infrastructure or worry about outgrowing it or if it is capable of scaling with your business needs. IFB can help you migrate across to IFB’s hybrid cloud solution, a flexible environment that provides the ideal platform for your business and enables innovation. With our high degree of scalability, IFB can add new resources at short notice should they be needed or take them away when they are not – without any loss in performance or disruption to users, thanks to our expert team.
Why IFB’s Solution?
IFB has been entrusted by SME’s and global businesses throughout the UK and beyond for over 25 years to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of business services from connectivity, security, cloud, data backup as well as VoIP and MS Teams Voice. IFB has been pivotal in our ability to deliver a platform which is scalable from small businesses to enterprises alike.
We are committed to maximising and supporting our customers’ uptime. Harmonious and effective collaboration between teams, divisions and departments is vital for the success of any business. IFB’s hybrid cloud solutions provide a secure environment where your employees can easily collaborate on files with colleagues or clients from their desktop computer, laptop, or mobile device.
Our cloud services also ensure that sensitive data always remains secure with backup included. It is important to consider your cloud-based applications - while your cloud providers like AWS and Azure may be secure, your data might not be backed up in a way your business requires. For example, there is only a 30-day retention period built into Office365, and Microsoft SharePoint Online is only backed up every 12 hours, with just a 14-day retention. IFB can help you deploy a hybrid solution with backup and long-term retention to suit your compliance requirements with standards from 12 months to 7 years. So, is now the right time to move into IFB Cloud Platform as part of your multicloud business strategy to help digital transformation?
In conclusion, with many companies refocusing on the digital transformation within business, hybrid cloud solutions are becoming more popular. We know that this is a big decision and can be confusing at times. What public cloud provider should you use? That answer is not simple because there are many factors to consider. The first factor is what type of workloads will be running on the cloud, and then how much data needs to be stored in that environment. If your organisation has lots of sensitive information or critical applications that require special security measures, it may make more sense for them to go with an infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform like IFB Cloud or AWS where you can control who accesses the data without having to worry about other companies accessing customers personal information through shared services. This also helps companies maintain compliance requirements by keeping all data with one company’s network including DDoS and firewalls, so nothing gets leaked out accidentally.
If you’re considering moving to a public cloud provider, we offer guidance in selecting the right one for your needs with our Business Resilience Planning Strategy service or by consulting with us about data backup options for Office365 and AWS. Additionally, for those who need phone services but want an alternative solution other than traditional PBXs’ we provide IP telephony as well as connectivity solutions between different cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) through our Cloud Connect product. Also, we can include IFB Threat Intelligence Platform to complement what you already have from a security perspective.
Why not join us in our next monthly Webinar to learn more about how IFB can support your business needs. Details coming soon.
*Source: Forbes