Cloud is one of the hot topics in IT and has been for the past few years. Prior to 2010, cloud products were often inferior to their traditional on-premise counterparts. Since then, however, much has changed, including advancements in telecom, mobile devices, and data center technologies.  Combine that with the maturity of cloud providers and products, and now cloud solutions are often positioned as the best option for law firms.

Recently, a company called me to discuss concerns about their IT security.  This company, based in the US but doing business with clients and vendors in many parts of the world, has been inundated with phishing emails.  The difference here is that these phishing emails are not just generic ones that pretend to be Microsoft Office 365 or UPS trying to steal passwords, but rather, they are spear phishing.  Spear phishing involves impersonating actual people associated with the company, like executives or vendors, in attempts to steal money or proprietary information.  These schemes are becoming more and more common.

When businesses today consider the future of their IT, cloud is always part of the conversation, and rightfully so.  Improvements in technology over the past decade have enabled many functions to be accomplished through a cloud service that previously required servers.

Anytime a business needs to make an IT decision, the primary focus should be value.  Change always has a cost – be it the time to implement or train staff in a new system, the cost of the unknowns in the new system (versus the knowns of the current system), or the actual hard cost in dollars of new technology.  In any case, a business almost always decides to make a change because they are confident that the value delivered by the new system will outweigh its costs and risks, and it will do so by ultimately increasing the company’s productivity and efficiency.  Given all this, we are often presented with a very simple question regarding our Boxtop cloud IT platform, “Will Boxtop save us money?”  While the answer is not universal and often takes some time to get to, it is most often ‘yes.’ Here is how.

We recently published a post, 6 Considerations When Moving Desktops to the Cloud, that discussed the most important factors to consider once a firm decides that cloud is the right decision.  The next step is ensuring that the implementation goes smoothly.

Over the past few years, moving desktops and servers to the cloud has become an increasingly attractive and popular option for businesses that rely on their IT to be secure, reliable, and accessible. Once a business makes the decision to move their desktops to the cloud, there are dozens of factors to consider and many providers to choose from.

Here are 6 of the most important factors to consider when moving desktops to the cloud.

If you’re a small CPA firm (think 10-50 employees), your IT scenario is probably as follows: You have a local IT consultant or MSP that you rely on and trust to help you make the right IT decisions for your firm. Perhaps you have someone in-house to help with desktop support (either a dedicated person or the employee who is stuck being the go-to for support in addition to his or her regular job), and every so often, when faced with an IT problem (outage, security breach or employee complaint) or large expense (repair, replacement, or upgrade), you find yourself wondering if there’s a better way.

Most cloud providers have a huge vulnerability and it's up to businesses to close this big security gap. Sound scary? It is.  But it does not have to be.