Support for Microsoft Server 2003 is officially over and will soon be altogether obsolete. As a result, IT professionals in the SMB marketplace are looking for newer, fully supported server solutions, and many are looking towards the cloud.
Data confirms that cloud adoption is swiftly becoming the norm for SMB servers, as opposed to entirely local IT infrastructure. In fact, 35 percent of today’s IT services are delivered via the cloud. What’s more, 54 percent of those currently using cloud started out with a legacy server.
As such, it seems that some degree of cloud usage is inevitable for many organizations’ futures and that a gradual transition is what businesses are looking for most. In fact, the aforementioned study reported that 59 percent of businesses would like to make more use of the cloud but the complexity of migration and integration is a considerable barrier.
So for partners selling IT infrastructure to their customers, it’s crucial to be intuitive to your end users’ needs, especially in this time of high demand for SMB IT solutions. Carefully choose your IT partners based on their ability to best serve your customers’ most pertinent needs, such as a smooth, safe and gradual transition to a cloud-based IT infrastructure.
To confirm that your reselling venture has the portfolio best-suited to meet the needs of your customers, onboard a best-in-class hybrid IT provider. In this way, you’ll be able to serve customers who are hesitant about migrating toward the cloud in one full swoop.
Here are two things you need to ask your potential IT provider to ensure it should, in fact, be your No. 1 choice:
Do you allow gradual scaling up toward the cloud?
Most businesses will, for the foreseeable future, maintain a Hybrid IT architecture (with a cloud and on-premise component). Perhaps one small business is simply not up for a complete migration of servers at the moment and would like to continue managing some data in-house while allocating less pertinent information to a hosted source. However, the future of this business might be to convert to a completely cloud managed server. On the other hand, some businesses may want to ensure a hybrid IT infrastructure for the continuation of their business venture so that they can enjoy the benefits of an internally controlled local server and the freedom of a hosted server. Whatever the customer’s vision is for its new server, your provider should be able to seamlessly accommodate the request without pressure to eventually convert to the cloud if that is not the end goal.
Can you guarantee business continuity?
Perhaps the most concerning factor in migrating servers is the possibility of productivity loss. A best-in-class hybrid IT provider, however, enables businesses to eradicate such concerns. Due to the nature of a hybrid adoption of the cloud, businesses can allocate data little by little to their new hosted source. Meanwhile, the new IT provider should ensure that local data stays put throughout the entire transitional process. In doing so, it provides peace of mind to customers that information they need around the clock will be accessible at all points of the new server implementation.
Get your potential cloud provider to ensure it can appropriately accommodate the needs of your customer base, or ensure your master agent or distributor is positioned to help you and your customers with a migration strategy to the cloud that makes sense.