IT Consulting in South Florida: Why Migration is the Hardest Aspect of Office 365

it consulting in south florida why migration is the hardest aspect of office 365 2

IT Consulting in South Florida
An important aspect of IT consulting is incorporating new programs and applications in your operations. Office 365 has been great so far in terms of increasing business productivity. It seems like the biggest problem businesses have had so far is migrating to the cloud. Once that’s set up, they have no trouble at all as far as adjusting to the hosted applications goes.

According to this article, migrating to Office 365 is becoming increasingly popular among businesses both large and small. The upside of moving from an on-premises environment to one hosted online by Microsoft offers compelling benefits.

There’s a reason migrating is the hardest part. Most business owners don’t have experience with cloud applications. Although they function like Windows program for the most part, setting them up is a different story.

For that reason, many businesses seek professional help to set their hosted applications up. According to a recent Info World article, this is particularly common with Office 365’s cloud Exchange:

“Office 365 has been touted as Microsoft’s fastest growing business ever. Still, some organizations are stalling when it comes to moving mailboxes from on-premises Exchange to Office 365’s cloud Exchange. What’s the holdup? For some, the need to plan and execute the transition may be competing with other day-to-day issues, delaying the Office 365 Exchange migration.”

Exchange is perhaps Microsoft’s most important program for businesses. But because they rely on email so much, they’re hesitant to migrate to the new hosted Exchange.

Here’s the good news: after the migration is over, your business productivity will increase. Employees will have access to the hosted Exchange from remote locations. The standard benefits of cloud computing also apply to hosted Exchange in this context.

The important thing is that you get the migration right. If you mess with the settings and employees aren’t able to send outgoing emails, then your productivity will take a hit. You can avoid this problem altogether by working with a professional IT agency. In this case, you’ll know that you’re starting off on the right foot regarding Office 365.

To talk more about IT consulting in South Florida, or anything else, please contact us.

How Much Does Business Downtime Cost?

how much does business downtime cost

If IT support isn’t available round the clock, then you can barely call it support. Because of the nature of IT problems, responding to a situation a day or two later just isn’t good enough. Businesses have to move along with their operations and they can only do so if they receive IT support immediately.24-7-support

A report by Emerson Network Power found information regarding the costs of business downtime. The report states that the average cost of data center downtime is now $7,908 per minute, up from $5,617 in 2010. In addition, the report lists the most common and costly reasons for data center downtime:

  • IT equipment failure
  • Cyber crime
  • UPS system failure
  • Water incursion
  • Generator failure
  • Inclement weather
  • Accidental human error

Chances are that if you own a small business, you don’t have your own data center. Many businesses now use hosted cloud computing services so they don’t have to purchase and manage their own data center.

But that doesn’t mean that the downtime cost doesn’t apply to small businesses. Data center downtime has considerable effect on small businesses and should be kept as low as possible.

This is exactly why it’s so important for IT support companies to be available all of the time. Each minute or hour of business downtime is so costly. If they wait till the next day to respond, thousands of dollars will already have gone down the drain.

At 4 Corner IT, we offer hourly support to assist businesses with immediate service. We understand that you want to resume business operations as soon as possible, and it’s our goal to make this a reality. We cover a variety of issues, such as:

  • Server repair
  • Network outages
  • Network down
  • General network support
  • Network lag
  • Recurring issues
  • Failure to complete on-going project, or costly delays

If you would like more information about IT support, contact us.