Cloud computing is transforming businesses across industries by delivering hosted services through the internet with unabated cost benefits and business innovation. Today, you may have seen servers are moving to the cloud, data stored in the cloud, and applications and services are hosted from the cloud. So, the question is “Should your business move into the cloud?”. This article from Arstechnica.com suggests that moving business systems to the cloud can be an ideal proposition for most small and midsize enterprises to better manage, secure, and support IT infrastructure.
The first assessment before moving towards the cloud is to check whether your business has sufficient bandwidth to support access to cloud services. Your Internet connection is a critical factor to cloud service access and you need to ensure that you have the bandwidth necessary to accommodate your business applications for best practices. All of the services that your users were accessing inside your data center are now being accessed through your Internet connection. If your business doesn’t have a suitable bandwidth, your Internet network will not be reliable and your Internet connection may fail during information transferring process, which can cause data loss.
The exact amount of bandwidth necessary depends on how much you plan to rely on the cloud service. As a general rule of thumb, 100 kilobits per second per user is sufficient for a good range of Web-delivered cloud services such as mail, collaboration, and CRM. However, most services show much greater variation and are not easy to calculate. Microsoft has a bandwidth calculator for Exchange, including Office 365 to help estimate bandwidth needed for your business cloud service.