Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365, is a suite of cloud software solution hosted by Microsoft and targeted to small and medium businesses.
I have used Office 365 since its inception nearly a decade ago. The premise back then was simple, and the theme still holds true: subscribe to their software rather than buy the license, and let Microsoft do the difficult work with running servers and hosting data and emails. Today, this philosophy rings truer than ever, and I am a firm believer in letting the big tech companies do the difficult, thankless work, while we consumers / businesses focus on our goals and values.
Here are some of the benefits of using Microsoft 365 and cloud in general:
- OpEx vs CapEx: Pay $20 a month and use evergreen, perpetually updated and secure software, rather than pay $200-300 for software that gets outdated after a year. Similarly, pay $100 /month for a virtual server that may otherwise cost you $5-10k to buy and deploy over months.
- Servers and hosting: Hosting servers, databases, emails is much more difficult and time-consuming and capital-intensive than small business owners might realize. Not long ago, it was very common to sink $10-20k to an Exchange server, plus a network fabric, firewall, load balancing, and not to mention backup and disaster recovery. For each business goal (e.g. email, SharePoint, Teams, etc), it is common to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a very basic architecture. Then you need to worry about storms, power outages, internet outages, etc. Businesses are expected to keep running, especially if you perform services for larger clients. Today, you can largely leave the complexities of running a 99.9%+ infrastructure to big tech such as Microsoft, AWS, and Google.
- Scalability: As a CIO for a mid-sized business, I routinely get request for adjusting our resource needs throughout the year. Seasonality of businesses, natural disasters, pandemic, and just business ebbs and flows, mean that I have to be able to support 500 users today, 1000 users next week, and 700 users the following month. Traditional IT practice dictates that I would ask (more like pry it out of) our business leaders’ minds what they think the high water mark would be per business area, and then I would buy easily 50-100% more capacity than the high water mark. Even then, we routinely underestimate the scaling needed. Best case scenario, we oversized and waste resources. Now, with a few clicks, I can scale up and down anything from user accounts in Active Directory, email boxes, SharePoint storage, Azure storage, CPU in virtual servers. This results in extremely lean and effective IT spend.
- Security and compliance: This is a topic that can span many discussions. In a nutshell, securing IT environments is very, very difficult, and it never ends. You can never spend enough, and a new threat is always coming. Losing data or getting hacked can result in severe privacy, reputation, and financial losses. The CIO in me always viewed this as an existential threat to the businesses I support. You might not be able to recover from a major breach. Moving to the cloud doesn’t mean everything is automatically secure. It does however, result in a much more secure environment out of the box, and the platform provides simpler network management and alerting tools that can otherwise be out of reach for a small business. Microsoft Trust Center shows you all the various security certifications and compliance regulations they have strived to meet. With the cloud, a small business can be equals to their bigger competitors when it comes to meeting security and compliance requirements. This benefit cannot be overstated.
- Cultural, philosophical change: The ultimate benefit of moving to cloud is eventually, you start to realize that you can focus on the things that matter to your business and your clients, rather than the thankless, high risk job of running IT. Don’t get me wrong, you will still need IT expertise, and this part is actually more critical than ever – it’s just a more rapid deployment, easier to secure, and much more affordable path to providing the services you need to run your business.
My advice to customers who are thinking of moving to the cloud:
- Do an inventory of what you currently have
- Hire experts to help you with your migration. While it’s easy to get started on cloud platforms, it is actually very easy to mess things up and require a lot of clean up later, or worse, security risks for your business due to poorly architected solutions. Interview these experts and don’t be afraid to use more than one.
- Best of breed philosophy: Use the best cloud tools for your needs. Use the best expert for the specific tools.
Feel free to reach out to me for advice / consultation on your cloud journey!