18 Years Working with Cloud Technology

Editor's Notes

• #3: What was the reason for forming the business - Bath/Edinburgh telephone need  Started to provide 'Hosted' services  Thought on how this was actually the very early days of 'Cloud' - before marketing created that buzz word  How the business grew  First employee?  Perhaps cover early pain points
• #4: How the adoption of Cloud services evolved  Some successful - SalesForce, Netsuite? We don’t have to mention specific services though (sales CRM eg)  Some uncontrolled - DropBox, Box, Google Drive - caused by lack of Cloud strategy (in those days, marketing hadnt dreamed up the word BYOD, so these problems just occurred unexpectedly)  Any unsuccessful? Pain of switching between cloud providers (eg integration of netsuite and salesforce?), or reverted from cloud back to in house? Does things like Netsumo count? Not quite Cloud, but outsourced, so same potential risks - poor documentation, lack of knowledge hand over.  Probably some points here about trusting your it advisor / cloud provider.  
• #5: Where+When the big changes happened (eg netsuite, SharePoint) - taking control  Adopting a Microsoft infrastructure with managed desktops - appropriate for the size of the business (50+ users), laying the foundation for fully managed use of Cloud services  Moved beyond a small tech team  Office 365  Consolidated file storage and uncontrolled cloud storage system  Created structure for the teams and projects in the business and enforced security  Boosted productivity and collaboration  Gave business consistent and always up-to-date tools 
• #6: The benefits to Small Businesses - need 5 to align with the Seminar title  Empower users with highly flexible and reliable services and allow your business to operate from anyway - also great for disaster recovery planning  Reduce management and maintenance complexity <- Concentrate on what you are good at (and not phoning IT support to fix the server)
• #7: No upfront costs (typically), predictable per-user per-month costs, no hardware to maintain or worry about  (op-ex vs cap-ex)  Beware of setup and professional services fees.   Get advanced systems that used to only be feasible for large Enterprises - always up to date - but what are the vertical / smaller options, eg. Capsule crm rather than salesforce.   Limitless scalability, grows with your business, and shrinks if your business needs it Next: Bainbridge video
• #10: Recommendations  Have a strategy - There isnt a one-size-fits-all Cloud service, you will need to mix and match - check how they integrate together. Office365 has a huge suite of services that all integrate seamlessly, but if you add services from 3rd parties, see how they integrate with the service you use currently (and your users are used to using) - For Example, SalesForce can be configured to use Office365 logins, so the users maintain a single set of credentials  Fully embrace the Cloud, half-hearted implementations don’t work - but do test, plan and train users!  Seek advice from other people using the service, and fully investigate the service and company you are planning to use (mitigate the risk of putting your company data with a Cloud provider that may go under, 2E2 for example) - Microsoft, Amazon and Google are the 3 big Cloud providers and eclipse everyone else.  If you use infrastructure then need to plan for failure. Generally it's better to use PaaS rather than iaas.  
• #11: Another example - Our Paralympic Gold medal hopeful  He has limited funding  Sponsorship  Providing Office365  Treating his team as a small business  Example of what can be done with Office 365  Video storage with tagging and search  Office 365 Planner for managing Rio 2016