What’s in Your Closet?

Forgive me if I’m a bit snarky in this post. Serious topics such as an ongoing pandemic and racial injustice have demanded deep thought and careful, well-reasoned dialogue from all of us.

So, I am going to instead channel my snark into today’s topic: What’s in your closet? Specifically, what services and applications are still housed in your server closet?

Ten years ago, I could have confidently predicted that you had multiple servers at your headquarters providing such services as email delivery, file sharing, and user authentication. It’s also likely that servers existed locally to provide remote access for your users. And there’s a better than 50% chance that your agency management system was housed locally on a server. That same closet may have also contained your phone system. The server room was crucial to your operation.

Back in the old days, like in February, you could at least argue that having those critical systems at your main office made sense because that was where your people were. Local access to all those services meant the applications were often more responsive because they didn’t need to rely on the Internet. But you and your employees are not at the office anymore! You’re in the family room, muting your Zoom call every time the dog barks, or junior pulls his sister’s hair. And speaking of hair, you finally turned the webcam back on, because you’ve been able to get a hair appointment after three months stuck at home!

But, I digress.

My point is that as your employees have headed home and/or become more mobile, the benefits of having your services in the cloud have become clearer than ever. Applications such as Office 365, AMS360, and Applied Epic leverage huge advantages of the Cloud including seamlessly permitting access to your users wherever they happen to be. Cloud-based applications are also more secure and more reliable than their local counterparts. They more easily scale as your agency grows because they are not limited to the size of the hardware in your server closet.

It may be economical in the short run to keep local servers running or take the time to carefully plan a migration from a local agency management system to a cloud-based one. But maintaining local services is a problem that will limit your flexibility in the long run as you reconsider your office space requirements, seek to comply with stricter security requirements, and support an increasingly mobile workforce.

So, what’s in your closet? Contact KiteTech and we can help you build a plan to empty it out.