What is the Cloud? (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

What is the cloud?

Hi! I’m Lexa from Encore and today I’m going to talk to you about what the cloud actually is, and how it can change your life. So I generally start by explaining to our customers two main points. One is location and the other is services. Location wise, right now if you are on premise, you’ll have a server or multiple servers in a server room. Instead of this, the cloud is basically just renting space from Microsoft and still using servers obviously, but you don’t have to house them in your building anymore.

So the second piece is the services and the services how that’s different is right now you have to maintain your servers, keep them up to date and constantly look after. The change here is that Microsoft will take care of that when you’re renting space in the Microsoft Cloud, which is Microsoft Azure.

From a financial perspective, every company has servers and most of them have server rooms. So when you have a server room, you have to replace the servers every three to five years, depending on what you’re running on them as well as keeping them up to date and maintaining them. The nice change with Microsoft Azure is that instead of doing all of that and having to take care of it, you can actually shift that capital expense and the money that you have to invest every three to five years and shift it into being a monthly expense. So you really shift it into being an operating cost.

The three main benefits, your servers are always maintained and up to date and all of the software is good to go on them. The second is that you have the ability to test projects that could have cost millions of dollars for like a fraction of the cost. And if it works, you can scale it up. But if it doesn’t work, you can test it for two months and then just turn it off. The third main point is as I mentioned before, your capital cost is replaced by your operating expense. The main reason that companies look at doing this is the potential cost savings. The fact that they can save 20% to 30%. Now, you can’t actually save 20% to 30% just from moving on-premise to the cloud. You have to actually change the way you do things and how you leverage your technology. If you’d like help with that, you can get in touch with us about a cloud roadmap at encorebusiness.com.