Moving Your SMB to the Cloud Part 1

Our small business is probably like most: routers, firewall, servers, and a lot of duct tape and bandages. After a recent server crash, I started looking at cloud solutions. What systems did we currently run and spend considerable resources on internally that could be moved to the cloud. This is the first part of our journey to move as many systems into the cloud as possible.

Aside from desktops, laptops, and tablets, our IT systems consisted of:

• A custom built ClearOs firewall/router/file server
• A dedicated Ubuntu backup server
• An Ubuntu host running vmware server that also served as a fire-partition separated backup server
• A Windows server web, email, and DB virtual machine running production and development sites
• A Windows XP virtual machine for  accounting software
• A dedicated data center server for production websites

The first step was the email virtual machines. After research and testing, we settled on Office 365 for email. This won out over Google apps primarily due to the robust online version of Outlook. Setting up exchange on iPad and iPhone also has significant benefits for us with how well synced calendars and contacts works.

We had been running Google Postini in the cloud for spam filtering already, and it was a fabulous system. But after a few months, Office 365 seems to be handling spam nearly as well.

While Office 365 is not perfect, it is a great first step to moving into the cloud for email systems. Web administration takes less than 5 minutes to have a new user setup and running. We also have most employees running the web version of outlook, which has the huge benefit of zero setup on the client computers and anywhere access.

At less than $10 per month for user, this clearly has already had an immediate return on investment. Whether you go with Office 365, Google, or another vendor, this should be a fairlsee seamless transition.