By Russ Levanway, CEO
To a lot of businesses, migrating from a server to the cloud seems like a no-brainer. It can cost less money, require less support, and use less hardware because space is essentially on loan as part of the shared economy. What’s not to like?
At TekTegrity, we see the benefits of switching to cloud services and often recommend cloud-based solutions for our clients. But we don’t recommend the cloud for all of our clients because we have to take into consideration the relationship between geography, connectivity speeds and economies of scale.
Cloud Cover
When any new trend is adopted, whether technological or otherwise, it’s often adopted unevenly in a way that heavily favors major metropolitan areas. Case in point, businesses in San Francisco or Los Angeles can move to the cloud much more easily than their Central Coast and Central Valley counterparts because high demand in those regions has created a market for the fast, cheap, and reliable bandwidth needed for cloud computing.
There are geographic corridors in SLO and Fresno where fast, reliable, and almost cheap internet can be found, but they’re very small. There is a fiber loop being built around SLO provided by our friends at Digital West, and that approaches cheap, but unless a business is inside the loop or corridor, the service doesn’t help their bottom line; without the prerequisite bandwidth (and most Central California businesses don’t have it), a move to the cloud may not be cost-effective.
Cloud on the Horizon
Despite not (yet) being fully part of the new cloud economy there are many instances in which migrating a company to the cloud in Central California makes sense. Larger entities with multiple locations connecting to headquarters are a good example: if they’re already paying for the bandwidth to connect several offices to a main location with a server and a lot of equipment anyway, migrating to the cloud is a good move.
For these clients (and we have several of them, like health clinics and franchises), migrating to the cloud means shifting the investment from hardware and equipment to greater bandwidth because price doesn’t matter at that point; if they’re already making the investment, the barrier to using cloud services becomes that much lower, and they’ll be ahead of the curve, locally.
Our IT company peers in major cities have seen their businesses transformed by cloud computing. In fact, if their companies didn’t adopt, support and roll out the cloud right away, they could quickly become obsolete. For that reason, TekTegrity offered cloud services very early in the trend’s trajectory with the expectation that, in less than a decade, cheap, fast and reliable options will exist all over SLO and Fresno. And when they do, we’ll be ready to offer cloud-based solutions to all of our clients.
