Why migrate to Office 365? A view from management’s perspective

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In this article we’ll go over some of the benefits of moving to Office 365 that will interest management. Not only are there great reasons to move to Office 365 from a user standpoint, but there are great business and financial reasons to move as well.

1. No Server Hardware or Maintenance Worries

How many of us have ever truly kept up with firmware updates? How many of us have experienced an outage because our firmware wasn’t up to date? Not only are there no server maintenance worries with O365, there’s also no need to worry about life cycling hardware. We all know how much time and effort it takes to plan, test and execute replacement hardware. It’s not just the cost of hardware you save on, it’s all the labor, lost time and stress that goes with it.

2. Financially Backed SLA

Office 365 is geo-redundant, has extensive disaster recovery capabilities, and comes from a trusted vendor. Over all the years we’ve been using O365, we’ve never experienced an outage. However, should that happen, Microsoft has financially backed SLA’s. If they don’t meet their SLA, you get back the percent of your subscription cost that they didn’t meet.

3. It’s Elastic (pay-as-you-go pricing)

When you need to expand to account for more users or employees, you just purchase more subscriptions. And the same holds true if you no longer have as many users or employees. it’s just as easy to reduce your subscriptions and cost. Using a dynamic model can save a lot in upfront cost.

4. Automatic Updates

Automatic updates have some great benefits. First, it’s a cost saver for the IT department. They don’t need to perform all the administrative overhead to get the updates deployed. Second, your users and their data are more secure. Since the updates are automated, if a vulnerability is detected and a patch released, even remote users will get the update. And they won’t need to connect to the corporate network to get them.

5. It grows with your business

When your business out grows your current solution, or to where you need an additional solution, all you need to do is identify the product, customize the configuration and deploy it. You won’t need to identify and purchase new hardware, purchase and install the solution, perform testing and then deploy it in phases to your user community.

6. Predictable and Manageable Cost

You know what your costs are going to be without any surprises. Gone are the days of running out of storage or having a server that just went out of warranty last month have a failure. With “as a Service” solutions, you know exactly what you’ll be paying for it from one month to the next.

7. Feature updates

No longer do you need to perform upgrades to your Exchange, SharePoint or other assorted servers to get the latest features, you just get them. And not only do you get to skip the work to upgrade, you don’t need to wait. As new features are released you get them automatically, not when you have the bandwidth to perform the necessary server upgrade and the budget to purchase new version.

8. Agility

Moving to Office 365, and Azure, makes your business more agile. As technology changes, so can you. The solutions you use in the future no longer need to fit within the physical confines of the datacenter you built out years ago. As easily as you moved to it, you’ll also be able to move away from it when the time comes. Moving to and away from future solutions will be as easy as flipping a switch compared to what we’ve lived through over the past 20 years or more.

We hope this has been helpful, and if you need any assistance or suggestions on your journey to the cloud you can reach us at info@imperitiv.com. And below is a link to the Office 365 roadmap. It’s a dynamic website where you can view all content or filter it down to just what you need.

Link to Office 365 Roadmap: https://products.office.com/en-US/business/office-365-roadmap

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