The Perficient team has just published the latest entry in our Perficient Perspectives series titled Microsoft Office 365: The Gateway to the Cloud. The Perspective which you can read here features an interview with Microsoft MVP Dave Greve, who also co-authored Microsoft Office 365: Exchange Online Implementaion and Migration with Loryan Strant.
From Microsoft Office 365: The Gateway to the Cloud
Identified as one of the top 10 emerging trends for 2013, cloud computing is one hot topic among business professionals today. Why? It enables organizations to be more efficient and agile, and lowers operating costs. When it comes to cloud offerings, Microsoft has gone all in, investing significantly in its cloud-based solution Office 365.
Office 365 provides Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools such as Exchange, Lync, SharePoint and Office, and delivers them through the cloud. Businesses that migrate to Office 365 can provide their users with the collaboration tools they need to efficiently communicate and collaborate with one another and their partners with anywhere access to email, web conferencing, documents and calendars.
Whether you are a small business or multinational enterprise, Office 365 can fit your organization’s unique needs. Given its value, it may be safe to assume that cloud services like Office 365 will be the cornerstone around which information technology strategies are built in the future.
Why all the buzz around cloud?
Without a doubt, cloud is becoming an industry trend, which is why more and more CIOs are considering the move to the cloud. Why?
- It’s a predictable service – The outsourcers can spread the investment in management, monitoring, security and maintenance over a number of companies, which reduces the cost per user to well below what any one company can sustain. This leads to a more predictable service for end users.
- Businesses can predict their costs – By moving to a service you flip your cost structure from CapEx to OpEx and go from annual (and unpredictable) budget increases to a per-user cost that is locked in for one to three years. As a side note, this is fantastic for IT organizations that charge back to the business.
- Financially-backed service level agreement (SLA) – The CIO is now the customer, not the provider. If there is an outage, there is an associated financial penalty to the provider, not a credibility hit to the IT organization.
You can read the rest of the interview with Dave here.
