Give up the legacy desktop to simplify, reduce cost and empower employees.

Moving to the Cloud doesn't have to be just for core systems, CRM and other major applications.  The Cloud is also ready for your desktop.  That is Office 365 or Google Apps can replace your standalone Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that reside on your desktop.  What are some of the advantage of this?

-Reduce Cost - Gone will be the individual license fees for each version of Microsoft Word you've deployed.  Gone will be the technology overhead needed to ensure patches are applied and applications repaired on desktops due to corruption or crashing.  

-Increase Security - Don't be held hostage to the emergency Microsoft Word update because of the latest virus.  With the Infrastructure and applications in the Cloud that best practice is being outsourced so you're employees won't have to wait for the update and you won't have to be converned about whether the update was correctly applied.

-Simplify the infastructure - Gone will be the gigabyte hard drives and gigabytes of RAM replaced with more efficient desktops and smaller, lighter laptops and tablets that will likely end up being not only cheaper to maintain a in the long run but cheaper to procure as well. 

-Empower employees - This advantage of moving productivity applications to the cloud isn't necessary as obvious, and frankly for some of your employees it won't be seen as empowering, at least initially.  Let's face it, IT support get enough complaints and questions just upgrading the Operating System or to the latest version of Word.  But once employees realize that the days of large laptops and crash prone, document enilating hard drives are gone, eyes start to open and people start to ask, why didn't we do this a long time ago?

But let's face the fact this isn't an utopian dream.  There are drawbacks and things you need to do to ensure success. 

-Provide Training - It is human nature to resist change and nothing more brings this to light then moving someone's "center text" button in their word processor. 

-Prepare your network and bandwidth - This stuff exist in the Cloud.  Is your network ready for all your associates calling out to a server?  

-Prepare for business continuity - The Cloud was built for many advantages in business continuity and disaster recovery.  Moving your desktop to the Cloud will leverage these advantages.  However be sure you have redundant network capabilities.

-Let's emphasize training again -  Your associates and teammates will initially rebel and perhaps even make the experience successful.  Using training as one of the avenues of change management.

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