10 Reasons to Move to the Cloud and Why it’ll be the Best Business Decision You’ll Ever Make
RapidScale’s CloudOffice is the first bundle in the market to include a full suite of cloud solutions for a business all in one package. CloudOffice is the ultimate “Cloud-in-a-box” solution which provides users with a virtual desktop, email, applications including Microsoft Office, virtual servers, and full disaster recovery backup all for one flat rate. It’s the first total solution for any business that makes it easy to move from the old-school in-house IT environment, to the modern, virtual environment.
Here’s why you’ll be jumping for joy when you eliminate IT headaches and save you company a whole lot of bucks by moving into the cloud:
1. Virtual Desktop
Virtual desktops (Desktop as a Service) are becoming widely embraced in the business environment. RapidScale’s solution, CloudDesktop, give a user the ability to work from the cloud, instead of relying on a physical desktop or laptop. You get the ability to login through your web-browser, desktop icon, or an app from the App Store or Google Play Store. Moving a workspace to the cloud gives you so many possibilities such as never having to worry about using that ONE laptop all the time, you can use ANY device anywhere, anytime, and access your desktop with all of your files.
2. Virtual Server
We move your in-house servers into our Cloud. It is the best service in the industry. RapidScale gives you on-demand capacity with the best infrastructure tools and utilities available. RapidScale’s Infrastructure as a Service (CloudServer) is backed by vCloud hypervisor, NetApp storage, and Cisco UCS blade chassis. The greatest thing about CloudOffice is that you never have to save anything anywhere other than in your virtual space. So what does this mean for you? No more physical servers in that server closet down the hall. That means no more backup generators, individual cooling units, or backing things up to tapes (yes, people still do that). With your infrastructure being hosted off-site, you free up your IT staff to focus on value-added tasks such as planning and development, instead of running around patching machines and fixing bugs.
3. CloudMail
While yes, everyone does have email. And yes, it’s pretty easy to get. RapidScale has wrapped our very own Hosted Microsoft Exchange into CloudOffice. Why is Hosted email better than any other kind of email? Well, it’s so much simpler. We do all the maintenance, so you don’t have to deal with the hassle of leaving a dozen voicemails with the IT guy to fix your email. The costs to set up hosted exchange are significantly lower than to set up an internal server, host all of your emails, deal with storage, backup, and recovery, and it’s so much more reliable. RapidScale uses the best of the best when it comes to our hardware (which, yes, was VERY expensive) so you get the benefit of the top-of-the-line stuff without having to buy it all. See you later CapEx, we took care of that for you.
4. Disaster Recovery
Did you know that housing your data in-house is EXTREMELY risky? What are you going to do if you have a power outage? Or what if the air conditioning stops working and your servers overheat and fail? You could be sitting on a complete loss of data with the possibility of going out of business. Yikes. The good thing about moving to the cloud is that RapidScale is fully redundant across all of our data centers. This means that say our data center in California decides to fall into the ocean, then the rest of our data centers take over and keep the data up and running, without a second of downtime. We run only out of the highest quality data centers in the world, which makes giving you a 100% uptime guarantee an absolute reality.
5. Cost
So let’s look at the facts here. In a traditional IT situation, you have to start with buying your hardware, which can be EXTREMELY pricey. This can rack up in cost when you start buying servers, routers, switches, desktops, cables, etc. Plus, you have to think about their refresh cycle. There is no infinity with these babies; they’ve got to be replaced every 3-5 years. So all that money you just spent, well, expect to spend that much every couple of years. Next there’s software. Every user has to have their own license, for every application they use, and on every device. To top it off, did you know these initial costs only make up 10% of your overall IT spend!? The other 90% comes when you have to factor in networking, IT labor, setup, facility cost, management tools, power/cooling, support, maintenance, security, backup, and disaster recovery. Moving to RapidScale’s cloud eliminates that entire headache, because we deal with all the hardware and software for you. Forget those in-house nightmares, everything is managed, hosted, backed up, and monitored 24x7x365 from the folks at RapidScale too.
6. 24x7x365 support
Have you ever had to deal with calling your IT guy and trying to explain to him why your email isn’t sending that thing to that person and them telling you “just restart it”? Well, we have these great people over here at RapidScale that can monitor and fix issues before you even know they exist. You don’t ever have to worry about trying to jump start your hardware or software when it starts to give you grief. We might not be in the office next to you, but we sure are just a phone call or email away if you ever have any questions anytime of the day, from anywhere.
7. Mobility
You probably have a laptop… and a tablet… and a smartphone… and if you’re up in the tech world, maybe even Google Glass. We bet that you get pretty annoyed when you have to drag your laptop with you wherever you go so that you can work on that presentation you need to get done. Here’s the thing about CloudOffice, you can access your stuff from any device via your web browser or our App. You can log in from the app on your smartphone, regardless of your operating system (check out the demo here) or work on your presentation from your tablet. Plus, once you hit save, it’s saved on your virtual desktop, which means that you never have to use flash drives to move stuff from one computer to the next. It’s all there on your desktop that lives in RapidScale’s cloud. How much more convenient can that be!?
8. Security
So let’s talk about security. RapidScale proudly houses our data in some of the top data centers in the United States available to the public. Anything higher is typically utilized by organizations like the government — for mission critical type stuff. Our data centers are all Tier 3, Class 1 data centers (find out what that means here) featuring full redundancy, biometric scanning for entry, fully enclosed and locked cages, round-the-clock interior and exterior surveillance, and more.
9. Stability
Since you’re running everything from the cloud, you can expect the same performance no matter what device you’re using. RapidScale gives you unlimited band running in and out of the data center, which delivers the best experience to all of our users regardless of where they work or on what device. Plus, with our 100% uptime guarantee, you don’t have to worry about wondering if your desktop will be up and running. It just will be, all the time.
10. Easy
So in the event that all of these other points haven’t won you over yet, the final way you can really love your new cloud environment is by experiencing how simple it is to use. Our interface is Windows 7 based meaning that no matter what device you use, you have a familiar, standard user interface that is simple to navigate. RapidScale takes care of design, testing, migrations, and implementations so you can focus on running your business instead of why the email isn’t working. RapidScale has made something so convenient and so efficient that you’ll be so glad you moved to the cloud.
