It’s important to think of your move to the cloud as a planned journey instead of an overnight switch. And, as with all journeys, the key is to establish where you are, where you want to be and how you’ll get there.

It’s also important to find a travel guide who can help you design a journey that’s right for your business. You need a roadmap that takes into account the specifics of your business, your goals, your current IT, your available resources and your staff.

A well-designed journey will pay dividends all along the way:

• You’ll get the benefits of the cloud faster.
• You’ll improve security and business continuity.
• You’ll decrease risk and minimize disruption.
• You’ll decrease and control your costs.
• You’ll bring your users along with you.

The journey design is where we come in. We focus on helping businesses just like yours plan the most sensible and highest value steps – then help you manage everything and support users.

A Natural Progression

Wherever you are on your cloud journey, you can benefit from the many companies that have gone before you.  For a lot of them, the journey progresses in three natural steps:

1. Files are moved to the cloud: To secure your files, make them more available and streamline teamwork.
2. Applications are moved to the cloud: Improving the security, availability and performance of your core business apps.
3. Desktops are moved to the cloud: You can stop installing and maintaining operating systems, software and applications on every computer.

These three steps don’t have to go in this order, but many companies have found themselves going in this direction. In fact, you can start anywhere and progress through each of the three steps at your own pace.

Let’s look at each of these steps, one at a time.