The coming economic downturn and how you can prepare 

It’s no secret that there is an economic downturn predicted in the near future. Businesses owners are going into 2023 with a more conservative outlook on their budgets and expectations for the year. Many companies have also adopted the new work culture of hybrid or remote working. With this in mind, how can you and your company be best prepared for when the economy is not in our favor?

We sat down with our Service Delivery Manager and Project Engineer to get a sense of what improvements they believe will impact businesses the most. The result? Moving to the Cloud.  

But what does “moving to the Cloud” mean? What is “the Cloud”? And why is it so good for businesses? 

This is the first part to a multi part series of articles answering these questions and more. 

Question 1: What is the Cloud? 

The Cloud is a collection of servers in data centers that are run by your provider of choice, whether that be Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. Azure is hosted by Microsoft in farms across the country and the world. There are many locations to ensure that your company’s infrastructure stays up and running, remains secure, and is as fast as possible. Having Microsoft host your servers means that companies save on cost of hardware – no need to buy servers anymore! They make sure your company is on the most secure, up to date hardware out there.  

The Cloud is also achieved by using Software as a Service (or SaaS). SaaS means you subscribe to software and use their services to run your infrastructure. A great example of this is Azure Active Directory. Instead of using the server farms that were described above using Microsoft Azure, Azure Active Directory uses software to run your company. 

Question 2: How do companies “move to the Cloud”? 

There are 2 ways of moving to the cloud: moving your servers as servers or moving to a Software as a Service infrastructure.  

Servers as Servers

Instead of managing servers in your office and running your business off them directly, services like Microsoft Azure handle the hardware for you and keep your company running and secure. That means all you need to worry about is the software running on those servers, including Active Directory. This type of setup is more true to the original infrastructure that companies may be more familiar with by running off servers directly. 

SaaS

Businesses are also moving to SaaS environments. As mentioned in Question 1, Azure Active Directory is a service that you can purchase that manages Active Directory for you, instead of you needing to host an Active Directory Server. All you need to get Azure Active Directory are Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses—and guess what? You may already have access to this application!

Hopefully this helped answer what “the Cloud” is and what it means to move to “the Cloud.” In our next article we will talk about WHY businesses should move to the cloud and why the cloud is a great place for all sizes of business, including small businesses.