With the rubber banding of work from home still on the cards, many IT providers are now talking long term with their clients about how to enable their team and support them going forward. Our clients all across the Chicago area are rapidly rolling out fully remote IT infrastructures.

In this article, we will detail some of the main benefits your business can achieve by migrating to Microsoft’s Azure platform for your business infrastructure.

We promise not to bog you down with technical details but instead hope that this article helps you make the right choices with your current IT providers (or by looking to us as an alternative).

Here are three reasons you need to consider migrating to Microsoft Azure:

Having a Hybrid 1st Approach

With the uncertainty of lockdowns, your business should consider a hybrid 1st approach. The strategy and concept behind a hybrid approach to your IT infrastructure are now standard amongst many other local companies.

Whatever the solution you provide, it must support remote and office-based staff. The IT solution should be robust enough that it can be maintained remotely.

Microsoft Azure allows for a hybrid approach and can help you migrate fully into the cloud with services like Azure AD Connect, which allows your older legacy (on-premise) servers to speak to Microsoft’s cloud services.

Flexibility

Another feature of Azure is the opportunity to scale or decrease IT services with minimal support overhead.

To give you an example of this, let’s say the business acquires a competing company. In the past, there would have been a significant support overhead in onboarding all the new staff into the current IT system. This would have to Include considerations around file storage and server capacity.

Now with Azure, servers and services can easily be scaled up or down virtually without the need for capital expenditure on new server hardware.

Legacy Systems

Finally, we must consider old, outdated servers. What do you do with them? Upgrade to a brand-new server and retire the old hardware?

Many businesses are now choosing to migrate services on the old hardware into Azure. Legacy hardware can still be used for both on-premises file storage or another location for redundancy and onsite backups of cloud-related services.

Cloud redundancy is a topic for another day; however, having a backup of such services as Office365 can protect your business in the event of a crypto locker attack or data breach.

If you would like to find out more about how your business can move to Azure cost-effectively, then get in touch with us today. We’re based in Arlington Heights, IL and help small business clients all across the Chicago area make proper IT strategy decisions daily.