It took 12 months, but I’ve nearly reached Cloud Nirvana

October 5, 2009 — In other articles, I’ve described myself and my company as ideal candidates for cloud computing. As with lots of concepts, it’s tough to beat Wikipedia’s definition of cloud computing, virtually every potential advantage of which has been a huge trouble-spot for my firm over the last year or so. Here’s a summary of our migration from a traditional “on-premise” IT infrastructure to an almost all-cloud platform. While every business is unique, my guess is that our experience mirrors that of lots of others; let me know if your experiences have been similar…or not!

Setting the Stage

A year ago I sold the part of my business that had traditionally provided open-enrollment classroom-based IT training services. With the part of the business I sold went a lot of overhead expense (classrooms take up a lot of room, require lots of computers to fill up the space, and require administrative and support staff to set computers up, move them around, schedule, cancel and reschedule classes, and the like). I was determined my new business would be profitable, so I wanted to minimize non-billable IT resources. Then the economy tanked, so keeping non-billable headcount wasn’t an option in any case!

In short, I found myself with zero dedicated IT staff…and an IT infrastructure consisting of at least eight internal servers apparently required to keep us up and running with e-mail, blogs, accounting, intranet, and our web site. We had a lot of bandwidth coming into our office, provided with byzantine complexity and benign neglect by AT&T. We had switches, routers, internal and external name servers, domain controllers…oi!

Making the Move(s)

We had a lot of different services that needed to be migrated – blogs, e-mail, intranet, internet, accounting, crm – and some that didn’t – domain controllers, internal name servers. This table lists them in the order of the migration date, and shows the platform we were running a year ago and what we migrated to:

Results

Most small to medium sized businesses are going to be better off with cloud-based services. The more legacy infrastructure you have the harder it is to migrate (see above), but it’s still gotta be done! Here is my executive summary, the high and low points and some editorial opinion. Of all the apps we needed to migrate, I have the most expertise on CRM, SharePoint and blogging, and I’ve written more detailed articles on those pieces, and will write more.

Forthwith, the executive summary:

• Dynamics CRM Online. This was the highlight of this adventure in cloud migration. The platform is rock solid (and simple to administer) and the architecture is the same as the on-premise version so there are no substantive migration issues. I’ve written about this elsewhere, and enthusiastically recommend Microsoft’s cloud CRM.
• BPOS for E-mail. BPOS (for Business Productivity Online Suite) is Microsoft’s hosted combination of Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting, and I can’t recommend it for most small businesses’ e-mail service. It’s complex enough that it requires internal IT skills, or a certified (and competent!) partner to assist you. One of the most important reasons for going with hosted services is to eliminate the need for specialized IT resources, and in my experience BPOS simply puts the internal support bar too high.
• BPOS SharePoint. I was careful in the previous paragraph to dis-recommend BPOS for e-mail. Its SharePoint implementation is actually quite good. The only two problems with the hosted SharePoint experience are:
  • It’s Intranet only, so we had to figure something else out for our public web site;
  • It’s bundled with BPOS e-mail.
• WordPress for blogging. I spend a lot of time blogging in my new slimmed-down me-centric business model. In February I moved my blog from MOSS 2007 to WordPress, and I’ve been blown away by the WordPress platform. I was a late-comer to the open-source phenomenon, and what an eye-opener it’s been! I use a company called DreamHost for blog and web site hosting, and I recommend them as well.
• Accounting. My company had a dedicated ERP server for years. We ran Dynamics GP, and while that’s a solid ERP application, it’s overkill for most small businesses and it too effectively requires dedicated IT staff to maintain, upgrade, customize. We switched to a hosted QuickBooks in July and it was a good move.
• Domain controllers, internal and external name servers…yuck! I can’t quite pull the plug on those yet, but I’m close, and when I finally do my IT staff and I are going to have a Big Party!
• Web site. This was a tough one, as it involved the most wrenching migration, at least from a philosophical standpoint: we’re close to completing a migration of our public web site from MOSS 2007 to Joomla. If you’re as true-blue Microsoft as I’ve been for most of my career, you might wonder what the heck Joomla is. It’s one of the leading open-source platforms for web sites, and in the end, as much as I love SharePoint, I had to conclude that for small to medium sized businesses, hosting your public-facing web site on SharePoint just isn’t the best option. This migration is worth a more detailed treatment, so stay tuned for that.