Why Move to the Cloud?

Having worked with IT Managed Services or large internal IT departments for years, I have been spoilt when it came to IT administration.

I'm now running a small business and find that too much of my time is spent on managing the IT requirements of the business. Instead of focusing on activities that drive the bottom line, I'm forced to spend hours providing IT support. In addition, the growing business means evolving requirements and more demands being placed on the server.

As a SharePoint solutions provider, I was investigating Telstra T-suite as a solution for a client and discovered that the Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite that Telstra T-suite provides solved many of my problems as well:

Hosted SharePoint? a
Secure Server? a
Microsoft Exchange? a
Minimal upfront cost? a
Try before you buy ability? a
Reliable, no down time? a
Upgrades made available? a
Scalable as my business grows? a
Suitable for a mobile workforce? a
Rapid deployment? a
Enough storage space? a

Allow me to focus on driving the business forward? CHECK, check and check!

Taking advantage of being a Microsoft Partner, I was able to deploy a 250 seat BPOS site for use within my own business. I am still in the process of migrating to MS Exchange from the current POP3/Horde server, and I am investigating using the additional accounting and HR packages for use within my business, but the biggest advantage has been having a hosted SharePoint server.

Of course, one of my clients has now migrated to SharePoint 2010 and my skillset is ideally suited to the 2010 environment so it requires some patience while the BPOS roadmap for upgrading to SP 2010 is currently trailing the release of the SP2010 server by some months. Happily, this has been the only downside to the whole experience so far.