Robbz: This Is The Business, Tech. Playbook your source for it. Help for your business. Welcome back to the podcast, ladies and gentlemen. We are on episode four. Finally. BJ and I are in studio and we both have our sunglasses on because we are ready to be outside in the clouds.
BJ: That's right. We're we're living it up outside. The sun's so bright. We need some clouds. To a darken. That sunshine.
Robbz: No, they're white puffy. They're happy clouds. Not the angry clouds.
BJ: They're happy clouds. They're happy, not angry clouds.
Robbz: That's all we're here to talk about, happy clouds.
BJ: I only ever see clouds when I wash my car.
Robbz: Got you. Well, you're in California. A lot less clouds. I am your host, Rob Z Olsen.
BJ: And I am your co host, William BJ. Pote, owner of Vtop Technology. We're here to discuss making business technology easier for people to consume.
Robbz: So one of the catchphrase topics that I know makes my eyes gloss over and certainly would make some of our listeners are the business manager, the chief information officer, the guy we call Brian that's listening to the podcast certainly make his eyes gloss over is the mention of the cloud. We heard about these take words, take phrases 20 years ago, and now everybody lives in the cloud and doesn't even necessarily know it. So we're here to talk about your business, how it affects being in the cloud and why it might not be your answer.
BJ: The cloud at this point has become such an overutilized buzzword that very few people these days aren't using some aspects of the cloud. And that's part of the problem. If somebody is extraordinarily cloud, they really don't want to go into the cloud. They're going to really have a hard time avoiding it. It's such a ubiquitous thing. We're hoping that our conversation can simplify it down for you a little bit and help you understand how to best utilize it for your business.
Robbz: I firmly believe that market agencies that sat down there and like, how can we sell technology? It's complicated. Well, let's just use catchwords. If they're going to be looking for something, they're going to be looking for these cool catchphrases. What's new and exciting? Cloud. All right. And then they beat it to death. When people were looking for ways, they're looking for solutions. They weren't looking for cloud. If you're looking for cloud, it was because you're curious about it. It wasn't because you needed something. We're here to show how the solutions run on that cloud. How do you want to start? You want to go with what? Cloud computing is a little history for us today.
BJ: Oh, goodness. I don't know if we need to go into a full history. I think the simplest way to explain the cloud is a meme. I saw I know we're going to go straight to funny memes.
Robbz: I'm in.
BJ: Right. There's very few ways better than a good GIF or meme to kind of convey a complicated thought.
Robbz: Now, is it a GIF or is it a GIF?
BJ: A GIF.
Robbz: GI f should be GIF. In my eyes, it is GIF.
BJ: Yeah, if you call it a GIF. I'm not a big believer in so the meme is there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer. To me, that really is it. The cloud is just you renting somebody else's computer at some level or another. This has been around for a very long time. You used to be able to rent mainframe processing back in the used to be able to partition off that processing and that CPU time. So CPU is the main heart of a computer that allows you to process. So it's literally central processing unit. Your iPhone has a CPU, your smart, thermostat has one, your car has probably a dozen. And there's lots of different types of processing. Everything has some kind of processing horsepower, so to speak.
Robbz: About the development, you said in the Is when people started using the cloud platform. So let's talk about the normal office and put ourselves in that prospect. Before you had someone with a typewriter and you were doing all handwritten documents, that's how business was done forever. Then immediately they're like, hey, we can do this easier with fancy calculators. So they got these fancy calculators developed into computers and they found out they can do this a lot better with a computer. They can take all of those 87 file cabinets and turn it into one giant tube monitor on their desk and have Kathy put that all in for you. So that was you transferring physical life to the digital life. Now, the next step that again started with only the biggest companies in the finally began use in the real world business in the mid to late 90s is cloud computing. Instead of having Kathy with that tube monitor, they take that and they put it in another location. That's where you pay for, like you said, for the CPU usage. Instead of you owning a box and having your data in it, you would put that box in, let's say, Arizona, in some building where they take care of that. All your data lives there. They're responsible for keeping copies, they're responsible for making sure it's on and readily available, and then all you do is use your Internet to connect to it from your location, wherever that may be. We do it now so commonly, even our everyday stuff, all of our iPhones, Android phones, most of all, this is backed up in the cloud in some server in Chicago or New York. We just live with that day to day when we access our email, our pictures, our text messages, most of it doesn't live on their phone anymore, which why we don't have that huge of need of having all the gigs that we used to on our phone.
BJ: Exactly. Well, the cloud has become so ubiquitous and we've seen several cycles over the last 20 to 30 years. Everyone used to rent mainframe, the old really gigantic computers, and they would partition that out and then they transitioned into, well, everyone needs a really strong computer at their desktop. And so like, it kind of transitioned from having lots of really big computers that people rented to have people owning it in their building. Over the last twelve or 13 years, we've started transitioning the other way again, where what you need on your desk is a lot less important than what you have somewhere else. And so the reality is there's tons of different types of clouds and just as many different types of clouds as there are in the sky. You deal with that many different types of public private hybrid. At the end of the day, there's a lot of different ways to attack this and understanding what has the most value for you and your business.
Robbz: So we talked about the simple thing of what is the cloud? We give them an example of how we even use it in our everyday lives. For business, it isn't any different. You still have your business applications on a computer and you access your data. That would be in an Arizona place, whatever your line of business software would host that in. So again, we like to pick on that trash flow guy. If you're a trash disposal company and you need to pick up trash cans, you have a system that would tell you when, where the customer is billing, all of it. And that generally could be saved either in your office on a big box that you paid expensive money for, or in Arizona where they got to take care of that box for you. However it's done either in local or in the cloud. That's how that's handled. So what is the different types of cloud you mentioned? Public private hybrid explain like we're five.
BJ: So the public cloud would be any of the generally accessible public providers. So you're dealing with Amazon Web services azure Cloud and Google Cloud. Those are going to be your big three players in the public cloud space. Typically a private cloud provider is going to be maybe your managed service provider, or you're going with a much smaller, maybe boutique cloud provider where they're a lot more dedicated to you. And then with a hybrid cloud, almost everyone is dealing with some kind of hybrid effect. I saw a really interesting use case for hybrid cloud where it was completely managed from Azure, but it was running on a cluster in the office of the client. They were able to control from the public cloud, but they're running on local resources and then there's all sorts of variations in the middle.
Robbz: Just to recap here quickly, public cloud are the big boys. The Amazons, the Google's, the Azures of the world, and those are in big data centers. Those are the Chicago, the La, the New york, the Dallas, Texas, those are the big data centers where they have that all done in one space. And they're automated, they're quick. You can rent them for whatever price that these providers give them to you. And that's what everybody runs on. If it's Netflix, if it's your iPhone services, it's all on these big boys, the small players or the private cloud. They're not technically open to the public. I can't just sign up an account and whip it up and quickly have it. I have to contact someone more local. So, for instance, you're in Redlands, California. You would contact Etop Technologies and they would have their own data center in Southern California. So it's physically closer to your office. And there's a lot of different pros and cons that we'll go over in a moment. And then hybrid is a little of both. Maybe you have a controller or one piece of it in the Amazon cloud, whether it's in Chicago, all those places where the rest of it sits at a cluster in a smaller location, maybe even in your office. And that can go 10% here, 90% there, or whatever mix that works best for you.
BJ: And that's the thing about the cloud. There's so much jargon. At the end of the day, your company has to have the right blend that fits you.
Robbz: So more importantly, what fits the person? So we talked about the line of business apps in a prior episode. I think it's episode two. Check it out. Those line of business apps, meaning the applications that you use for your specialized business. If you're a car company, you have lot management programs. If you're a bakery, you probably have an order system so people can order your baked goods online. Everybody has something specific to their business, and that's generally what drives am I going to do it in the cloud? Am I going to do it in my office? Am I going to do it somewhere in the middle? Am I going to call a guy in Southern California because I know that he takes care of me and I know it's close and have that proactive conversation. Generally, it's predictated. So if you have a company and we'll pick on Trash Flow because I know we can, and we like, that company already have Trash Flow.
BJ: I hope they don't ever listen to this podcast. They're going to love it.
Robbz: I don't know why we picked Forgive US.
BJ: It's a funny name.
Robbz: I love it, right? They have software that runs. You purchase a server, that server can cost you anywhere from what, four grand at the bare minimum for a nothing server all the way to I've purchased personally servers for $28,000. It depends on how much horsepower you need to run it. Trash flow is not huge. You're not going to have something huge. So I'm going to guess maybe, what, five grand, six grand for a server? For something like a trash flow. To run. You can put that in your office if you want to buy the hardware. And then you to make sure that there's an It expert to service and maintenance It and make backups. So pros and cons, if we put that trash flow in an Amazon warehouse center or a smaller third party warehouse center that's closer, that data would be already backed up. I wouldn't have to pay for that $5,000 for the server. I wouldn't worry about pouring coffee on it or my building burning up in flames. And generally they're going to at least have basic backups, putting it into that cloud center. Not perfect backups, but at least basic backups.
BJ: I would like to maybe point out that your cloud provider will do whatever you tell them to do. For the clients that we host in our data center, we do provide backups. That's just part of how we operate. But a lot of places don't.
Robbz: That's the difference between that public and private cloud. Public cloud, they won't really have backups. Private cloud almost exclusively does because it's more of a handheld scenario.
BJ: Well, again, the public cloud, you absolutely can have backups, but you have to tell it to do it. And so we're starting to do a lot more public cloud type work with Azure. But we're also making sure that we really understand the contingencies. So that way if we set somebody up, we for sure know that they're going to be safe. That's the part that's important to me.
Robbz: Now the pain points of that, we'll go back to the line of business software. We're pretending trash flow here, we can pick A or B, right? The cloud, they would require a monthly fee because they have to pay for the space in that Chicago warehouse or the private cloud close by. They still have to do the things that generally you would be responsible for doing in your office. But it's higher availability. If the power goes down in your building, you can't service those trucks that are out and about because they have nothing to connect to in a cloud environment. If a section of one of the big boys, we'll pretend it's Google. If a section of Google goes down in Chicago, they can have an image of that already running on a cluster server in another location or a part of that same building. So uptime is much, much higher in these cloud scenarios and availability can be, but there's also latency. Now when you pick up your telephone and you call someone in another country, we really don't see latency on those phone calls. But Data is much more than just a simple voice. So if you need something high availability or you want that system to go quick, the latency between, let's pretend Southern California and New York can be a real issue. Some of these applications can take seconds for each request to process, which is real time in your day to slow you and your team down. So, again, pros and cons for both, and we'll go over more, for sure.
BJ: Well, and let me explain Latency for a second. So, to me, everyone knows what an echo is, right? So, like, when you yell into a canyon, the longer it takes for that echo to come back, the cooler it is. The reality is the Internet works exactly the opposite. You want to yell into the canyon and have that echo hit you back instantly. And so that's effectively how latency works on the Internet. Inside your office, I'm going to use a number just for comparison, but inside your office, you should be under one millisecond. If you go, like, to something within 50 miles of you, you're probably going to be ten to ten to 30 milliseconds. If you're going to New York, you're dealing with 60 to 100 milliseconds.
Robbz: And that's in China most pristine conditions.
BJ: Yeah. For us here in our office in Redlands, we're on a fiber connection. And for us to get to Lax, the Lax Data Center, it's four milliseconds. For us to get to our San Jose Fremont area data center, we're dealing with 15 milliseconds. Super reasonable. Like, that's a fast return, but you start dealing if you need to deal with something. In China now, the absolute fastest it can be is around 200 to 240 milliseconds, because that's literally how fast light can travel from Redlands, California, through the underground cables over to China and back.
Robbz: Now, that sounds like milliseconds. What are milliseconds in my day, but that's just for one process. If your system isn't built to just relay small amounts of data and instead has to do with large amounts of data, you times that 200 milliseconds by each task it has to do. So I had a customer that they want to say, hey, we want to move to the cloud. We're done dealing with the server here in our location. We want to move that to the cloud so we have better availability and we have less cost up front. I'm like, I'm in, but we got to test it. They spun us up a server. It was halfway across the country, and they did not have the software prepped, so each request took seven minutes. And this should be the stuff that they're doing snappy in a few seconds. Seven minutes to do this per request. Now, imagine that I picked on Kathy is the name. Imagine Kathy up front that does a lot of your data input, that has to put everything into your system. Imagine that her couple second task now takes a couple of minutes. It's rather unacceptable, frustrating. Definitely test it out. We're not saying cloud's bad, but if the software you're using isn't prepared for being on the cloud and you're forcing it, you're going to have a bad time.
BJ: Well, and again, some of this is something a business owner probably shouldn't understand. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a good concept of It, but really talk through the situation with your It provider or your It person because they're going to ideally they have your best interest at heart and they're not just trying to shoehorn a situation in. So one of our bigger clients is a distribution company and they have Sage 100 and that's an ERP enterprise resource planning software. It's an extremely heavy SQL database, lots of people using it and they had the option to go to their vendors cloud. We were able to have a conversation with them, understand what their needs were, give them an extremely fast local solution and then present it to all of their end users like it was anywhere, so they can go to app theircompany.com just like if they were in the cloud and they can access their applications from literally anywhere. But then conversely, we had a client who had a bunch of different tax programs, it made sense for them to be in our private cloud. And we're working with a prospect right now where they have a huge amount of liability dealing with Windows licensing and such. But as a result, the most effective thing for them was to move them to a full cloud approach where we lifted their servers, we lifted their desktops, everything straight up to the cloud and can provide them a really clean path forward.
Robbz: So some things we didn't cover is cost. So when you go to the cloud, most of the time the line of business solution you have has their own cloud and they'll make pricing for you quite easy. If you're going to take ABC tool and say, hey, we've had It in office here, do you have a cloud solution? I'm like, absolutely, here's how your price change? And they'll lay it right out for you. It's going to be probably a monthly solution, probably a service contract on top of it, what I would consider very reasonable. And if you have a line of business solution, don't sway away to your own cloud platform just because you can. They're offering It, they're supporting It, they're the experts. And try them first. Have them put up a test scenario, test them out and have them be your first step, at least for line of business. If you have an It personnel, this all should be going through them or your managed It personnel because again, they're in your best interests and should be part of this conversation first and foremost. But if you have that option, use your line of business software and their options. If they're not completely out of reason, then if you have what isn't a line of business software and you just need to do data, whether it's Word documents, whether it's simple databases, whether it's something that you've made in house, that is a completely different scenario. And generally, unless there's a third party involved, there isn't just direct pricing. If I wanted to have a server, just hold all of my Excel and Word documents and I wanted to do it in the cloud. We have easy solutions like 365 or Google Workspace that take care of that for you. In team drives OneDrive, whatever the tool is to make it cost effective and then you pay per user. The legacy way that we used to do this before we had cool things like Office 365 or Google is we had to go pay an Amazon, a Google and Azure for our section of one of these servers in a Chicago area. And then we would have to pay them. It wouldn't be a flat rate, it would be like they charging you for you turning on your car. How much gas did you use? How many miles did you go? How many bumps did you hit? And then you get this kind of question mark pricing of what does that server actually cost you? So the only real way for people to test and see how much it costs was to put your environment, test it for a few days, and then look at your bill. They've made it so much simpler. Now, in that sense, it's much friendlier to go to the cloud, have a line of business software, find ways to host it, and work with your team, your tech experts, and your line of business software. And for everything else we have the workspace.
BJ: The Office 365, that is part of where I'm saying I think the hybrid cloud is really how most people function these days. So even our we'll call them fully premise based clients for their applications. Every single one of our clients is using Office 365. Well, that's cloud. Okay, well, they have a Sage 100 ERP on site, but they're using Office 365. They're doing a lot of their document sharing through OneDrive and SharePoint. They're using different web applications like Monday.com or Asana for project management. There's a lot of different ways to kind of hybridize your approach. So part of why we went with a full server system for them was because we were able to make sure that we had enough horsepower. It's a fixed cost and we can amortize it out easily over five years versus they're able to spend $45,000 in one shot to have this done over that five year period. But to replace it would have been easily 2500 to 2800 a month, which over a five year period was quite a bit more. So it's just understanding the best use case for your business, like what kind of applications you're using, how do we balance it to give you the best.
Robbz: Most effective outcome going to a managed service provider. Because if you have an internal It guy, his whole audience is the end user. He wants to have all the stuff so he doesn't have to stay up at night patching things. He wants to have backup so he can sleep at night knowing that it's working and his end user is his audience. If his end users are happy and working, he's not bothered. Managed service providers are. That plus another step we think upon cost because we have to charge you something fair for us to make bread at the end of the day while still being cost effective for you. So when we look at a solution, we'll go, okay, here's Sage 100. We have two options. We self host, we cloud host. What's going to be the best? We're going to look at what your needs are, what you're going to really rock the house with, what's going to be most fashion efficient while being the most cost effective. So when we look at it, it's not cloud every time, it's not local every time. Every scenario is a different fingerprint snowflake, as I would like to call it that we got to find the best solution that works for what you're expecting. If you're expecting to have everything instantly work, it's going to be high availability. We're going to follow that solution with cloud or in premise, whatever that would be.
BJ: Exactly. And in some cases, we find that going fully cloud. So for any of our clients that don't have a heavier premise based application, we are pushing them fully cloud. So we're moving all of their storage anytime. Instead of doing a server refresh, which we like doing, I mean, everyone loves most It. People love their buying their box and playing with it in the corner. But at the end of the day, for a lot of our non premise based clients so they have one of our law firms uses Maris case. It's a practice management tool, fully web based. It runs on any web browser. It interfaces with their office 365. They're 100% cloud based, moved all of their files from their server up, lives in their office 365. Or in Maris case, there's no reason for them to have a server. We can literally ship them a laptop. They log in and it'll set it up perfectly for them every single time. That's pretty amazing.
Robbz: When you're asking this and you're talking to your It guy, make sure that your It expert, whether MSP. Internal It guy, make sure that he understands what the end goal is. Don't just say, we have this cool tool, we need this hosted. They'll take that and just do what you say. They're not thinking of the end goal. You had this cloud as a restaurant scenario that I liked. You want to share that with the crowd.
BJ: Shoot. So cloud is a restaurant. So as a customer, we order meals, but we don't ever go into the kitchen to find out how things are made. Yes.
Robbz: So I would like chicken parmesan, please.
BJ: Chicken parmesan. Extra what?
Robbz: Extra wine on the side.
BJ: Extra wine on the side. But you're not realizing all of the different processes and pieces that go into getting you that extra wine. You didn't go stomp on some grapes. And you didn't have to make the.
Robbz: Alfredo sauce for my parmesan. You didn't have to bread the chicken.
BJ: Exactly. You don't see the complexity involved in preparing anything. But similarly, cloud provides services like storage servers, database software that users can use without having to understand the complex underlying infrastructure that powers the services. You literally just order and the cloud provides it.
Robbz: But if you walk up to your It guy and say, hey, I just want a restaurant and I need you to figure it out, he'll go, okay. And somehow burgers and fries show up, chicken nuggets for the kids, nothing. That the endpoint. The end customer wanted. They got they got something similar because it was in their idea. They never got the user's story of what that should have been. You have an expert on your hands. They have to know, what your goal? I want to wake up in the morning, I want to press a button, and I want to be able to access my customers data so I can make sales. You need to explain that full story so they can make that happen and work their magic and build the kitchen well.
BJ: And it kind of goes back to the other example of like the cloud is a storage unit. We all have somewhat limited resources, right? Unless you're willing to build your own data center and have just unlimited amounts of servers with unlimited amounts of storage, at some point you're going to run out. So part of the benefit of using some of the public providers is they are doing that. They are doing that exact scenario where they have multiple data centers. They're constantly adding new and increased hardware and software and servers and hard drives. Like all of the parts, all of the complexity of ordering your food, they're doing that constantly. So that way you can effectively just shove data in that data center as fast as you can put it. It's a lot like a storage unit. So instead of you filled your house up with junk because we're all data hoarders, you know what we are. Instead of having all of that junk in your house or your garage is full, now you can go rent a storage unit except it's for your digital things. I mean, to be fair, that's a lot of what, like, icloud is. I use icloud on my iPhone because it backs up all my pictures. I've got 800 gigs of pictures, but a 256 gig iPhone. But they're all available on my iPhone at the end of the day. That's pretty amazing. It's like having a storage unit you don't actually have to go to.
Robbz: Let's put that in a real world environment. Let's say that I am in and out burger, right? That's pretty popular in Southern California.
BJ: Oh, that's extremely popular in Southern California. That's a West Coast come to the rest of the world.
Robbz: Let's say that I had. A nicely sized but private data center and they were taking care of all of my technology needs in one data center. Then suddenly me as the in and out owner go, I'm going to purchase all of the Carl's Jr. So I get now the East Coast and double my reach. Well, immediately I'm going to need a lot bigger data center right off the get go. So if I had this locally hosted in my own servers, I'd have to immediately try to figure out, spend money, build these servers and put it up. And there's a lot of delay time. If I have it in private center, they're going to have to do the same thing. Maybe they have some extra, but they're not going to have near the amount we're going to need to take on Carl's Jr. And get this done quickly. If I have the Amazon, Google or Azure, I can click a button and no matter how big it is, it will be there within minutes. It's just there for instantaneous growth. Now are you listening the owner of in and out and you are looking for a data solution? Probably not.
BJ: But even to the shit, you should talk to us. I'm just joking.
Robbz: But your business, however small, still could double. Maybe you're successful, maybe you purchase something. Real world scenarios happen. You got to ask what is your growth going to be in the next five years and how are we going to do that? Technically cloud gives you that much more flexibility, I'm telling you.
BJ: And the cloud is dealing with it at so much scale that even if you double or triple or quadruple your data and it seems like a lot to you, the reality is at the scale that these cloud providers are intaking data, it's really just a scale. It's a minuscule amount. So that's part of why it really can appear it is effectively unlimited because you might go from 1 terabytes in two years, which that's a substantial amount of data growth. But to a cloud provider who's dealing with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of terabytes a day of ingested data and realistically more like petabytes, which is a lot of terabytes.
Robbz: Now you're getting nerdy.
BJ: Now I'm getting nerdy. Sorry. Yeah, I try not to. So you have one car and in two years you go to four cars. You need a bigger garage. But this is like carvana just ingesting all of these cars into their warehouse.
Robbz: Thank you, I needed that. Bring it down to my level.
BJ: Yeah, sorry, I do my best.
Robbz: They're not sponsored by carvana, but call us.
BJ: Yeah, if you happen to be carvana, we'd be okay. Like in and out in carvana, call us.
Robbz: So we talked a little bit about pros and cons. At least Kim knit. And we talked about some cost implications. Next in our list is security concerns. Most people say, hey, moving to the cloud is more secure. I don't have to worry about it. Go, tell us, is this true? Is it not? Is local better?
BJ: So I will say your miles may vary a little bit. You've heard of some of the biggest breaches in the world have been related to somebody not securing the cloud, but almost all of the small breaches have been related to somebody not securing your office. So you need to take a look at the security of the platform you're using. And this is one of the reasons why I've generally steered our clients away from using the line of business application providers services, not because I don't think they're trying hard. But you have in one of our previous episodes, we talked a little bit about some of the security implications of It. And we have a client who uses a door software, or It's, a field door scheduling software. We had a conversation with the line of business software, and we were not getting the warm and fuzzies. It was a real concern. We knew that we could effectively secure their environment if we kept it low cool. But we knew that at the second we put their data in their environment. We're risking a company that we don't trust. Putting it into azure. If we could put it into Azure, I'd feel pretty comfortable with how we got it there because I know that we're going to enroll multifactor. We're going to limit access, we're going to go through all of the steps. But I was not feeling that same comfort level with these guys.
Robbz: It's a 50 50. If I've talked to a line of business provider and they're like, we have a cloud solution. How new is it? So new that we're not requiring the simplest of password changes. We don't have any security documentation to give you. They haven't got there because they're still building the tool and not worry about security. That's a time where I just back off. Regardless if it works or not, it's not secure. Someone that has even a polished program still a 50 50 shot. You have to do your diligence. Have your It guy vet these people to see what is their processes, how are they doing this, and what steps are they taking. And if they don't have any documentation, they're not doing it. I don't care what they said, they're just not doing it.
BJ: 100% to that point. Start finding out, are they SoC Two audited every year? SoC Two has a lot of regulations around physical security and data security. You really need to dive into who their client base is, what are they doing to secure things. And that goes for us. We spot check ourselves constantly because all it takes is one wrong configuration without realizing it, and we're risking your data.
Robbz: And ask for simple certifications. If you're a dentist's office and you're holding people's medical records, they have to be that if they want to do business with you. So I mean, one more step if you know a certification, you have to have. If they don't have it, they're an extension of your business. Don't do it.
BJ: Exactly. So are the security concerns real? Yeah, absolutely they are. The cloud can be just as insecure in premise and you can be extremely secure in the cloud and vice versa. I've seen extremely insecure cloud environments and very secure local environments, so it's not a one size fits all and you need to pay attention to it and it needs to be something that you think about.
Robbz: The cloud is not any different than local as far as security, in my opinion. Maybe you'll find a specific case where it's more secure or less secure, but in general, it's still a box in your office or it's a box somewhere in somewhere's data facility. They still need to be accessed. They still have to have professionals go through, do the diligence and make sure that you've checked those boxes along the way.
BJ: These for the love of God, turn on multifactor, please.
Robbz: That should just be at the end of every podcast. And remember and neuter your cats and turn on multifactor authentication.
BJ: Exactly. Is it something that's 100% foolproof? No, it isn't. But it is so much better than not having it. It's dramatically better than not having it.
Robbz: It's sliced bread, peanuts yeah, right.
BJ: And peanut butter.
Robbz: All right, so let's say they want to migrate migration to the cloud so you can expand common challenges and how to plan for a successful transition.
BJ: A lot of that comes down to understanding what are you migrating? Are you migrating files and folders? Okay. That has a fairly simple migration path into something like Microsoft 365. Are you migrating a line of business application to a hosted server or are you moving it to a web app? Are you switching applications and going from stage 100 ERP to, like, NetSuite? NetSuite happens to be an ERP as well. It's just fully cloud based. It comes down to your specific use. Case is extremely important. Think through these challenges and integrate your It person, ideally months before you need to make this happen. Because it's not just, hey, we're going to the cloud tomorrow and you're going to be there. It's not going to go well if you don't have some planning and thought.
Robbz: So anytime you're transitioning anything, regardless of if it's upgrading the software, if it's going to be moving from A to B, if it's going from one software to another, you should have that plan of attack. And don't do this just on a Friday, especially if Friday was a holiday, like a three day weekend. Stop doing that. I don't know why you're doing that. In fact, Friday should be cut off from now on, if you want to do any changes, these people should be doing this on Tuesday. You should say tuesday 05:00. If I need to move files from A to B. Well, just to give that out of the example, I have all of these flat files. Word Docs, Excel docs, you can call it our company drive, if you will. We want to move that from one place to one place. Tuesday, tuesday 05:00. Everybody's out. They're locked out of the drive. That way people aren't editing things. You move it over, you have someone do their best to validate, and then come Wednesday morning, if there's issues, the It team is there to address them and tackle them as soon as they're there, rather than waiting till Monday morning and killing half of your week and forgetting what was done.
BJ: I completely agree, Robbie. I personally really love doing migrations. Like Tuesday to Thursday, like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday sometime. The reason being is because you have vendor support available. We're not having to scramble and work weekends. It's usually a far better outcome for the client doing a cutover during the week simply because then we're not going into a Friday evening doing it. Then your team can't work for the weekend and we're checked out because we need a break too. And then Monday morning is just insane and you lose a day of productivity. But if we do it like Wednesday afternoon, I even like sometimes doing it at like two or 03:00 in the afternoon because then we can have somebody hang, a couple of people go home early, some people hang out. Let us do the finish of the migration and start setting things up. Like for Office 365 migrations, we'll do it a lot of times in the afternoon, like 03:00 in the afternoon. That way they finish, they're busy work in the morning. People are typically wrapping down by mid afternoon, and if there's a few minutes of non availability, almost nobody cares.
Robbz: Now, if you're doing software now, the next example would be software A to Software B, you're changing a vendor. Most people talking, listening to this podcast might be a small business owner. And you use QuickBooks. Everybody uses QuickBooks as an it person. Not the biggest fan of QuickBooks, but that's just because I have frustrations with intuit. When you live and breathe nothing but that program, you're just going to have a little bit bothered by it. Again, the world uses QuickBooks, but you want to move to something different. So a common application that people are considering moving to is zero X-E-R-O. It's QuickBooks. They would have on their local server. It's on premise and they're moving it to a cloud solution, which is zero that they have all the hosting on. Number one. The first conversations you have is talking with Zero saying, what do you have to take that database and move it over for us? Is that a service I can pay you? What is that going to look like? Can we do a sample to make sure it works? So you do the test sample, you work with them, you get a contract and you plan that out again. That's not one of those things that you do overnight. And you just say, well, we're moving to Zero tomorrow. We're just going to trust the vendor that they're going to have that you're going to vet security, you're going to do samples to test it. And then when you do, you already have users, trained documentation, public communication. You don't just keep it between management and the It team. It's a full scale project that you all go forward on. Otherwise you're going to stumble along the.
BJ: Way to that exact same thought process. We use a product called ConnectWise Manage. It's a professional services automation tool. Moving from manage to something else would be a Herculean effort. But we were looking through, we were talking to another provider called Halo PSA. They're effectively ConnectWise. Manage. Right? They're like, well, we have a full onboarding. We know how to import data from ConnectWise. We've done this migration so many times, we know how to do it cold and help you set up with a process. This is an unlimited onboarding and the onboarding is free. You start hearing things like that, okay, they're confident in that migration. My suspicion is that Zero from QuickBooks would probably be pretty reliable, but we're still not going to make that move without thinking through like, okay, here's our process. We need to make sure we can replicate it from one platform to the other. If you have a specific accounting practice, you need to make sure that you're thinking through. Can the other platform do what I'm doing in QuickBooks desktop, for example, at.
Robbz: Least gives you a high level of how to begin to this. Those conversations we'd love to have, that's what we have with our customers every day. When they want to say, hey, I'm looking to move for this, what would you recommend? How should we do this? It's a project to be planned out. It's not something that you just tell someone go do and make happen and then watch your business break for a few days. That's unacceptable to wrap things up. I know we have definitely some more to go. We might have a cloud too. I think that's a fair thing. If people have more directed questions.
BJ: Honestly, the cloud is such a big topic that probably would make sense.
Robbz: Until then, do you have any real case instances of a successfully migrated instance that Etop specifically did no names given because we have NDAs with our customers?
BJ: Well, part of why we don't ever talk about our customers actual names is because they are associated with us, they suddenly have some risk put onto their head. But you're wanting to talk through an accessibly migrated cloud transition.
Robbz: Sure. Like a real case where that worked out with our assistance because we're again the representative managers provider or the internal It guy versus how they wouldn't have done it without us. Not just toot our own horn. But I mean, we are an example case here.
BJ: Well, I mean, we are pretty cool, right? We were working with a law firm here in our town. We realized that they use an online practice management system. So it's already fully web based. They're doing all of their work inside of Chrome or Edge or Safari, one of the main browsers. And all they were using the server for was files and folders. I had a conversation with our team. Are we comfortable moving them over to this specific license on Office 365? So we particularly moved them over to Business Premium. It's a really amazing license level and in my opinion, it is what you should be using if you're under 300 employees. There's a tremendous amount of value in that license. For Microsoft, we talked through what the migration would look like. We sat down with their managing partner and said, hey, for a fixed price, we'll move all of your data up. And so we migrated all their data to Azure. We then set up and moved all of their machines over to Azure from the server and basically mapped them, as you said, a shared drive, but from SharePoint through OneDrive to their local computer.
Robbz: So for the end user, it didn't feel different. They still went to their same file Explorer. They still found their files that they were doing it's as though they had no training needed, although we still communicated with them. And in the end of the day, our favorite keyword, the customer didn't see any difference. They had better availability, we had better scalability, so we didn't have to keep throwing resources at a server. And the overall cost for the customer was lower. Now people are like, well that doesn't make sense. Why would you proactively do that for the customer if it's less money? Because if that customer is happy, that customer is going to grow and we're going to grow with them. So we don't care if it saves them money. Great on us. We did our job well, right?
BJ: And so they're spending like $10 more per user licensing.
Robbz: There you go.
BJ: Like our cost of them went up $120 a month. And honestly that was all straight passed through to Microsoft. Microsoft was making $120 a month more, not us. So we did get paid to do the transition, but we don't need to sell them a server going forward. For them it was a really big win because now there's just no hardware involved. They have computers in their office, but besides the computers in their office, that's all they need to worry about.
Robbz: $120 a month. After five years, not including the maintenance and all the stuff that we would have to do to upkeep that same box, just the box, man, would be that five years of $120 a month. So the overall cost was significantly less to the user or the customer. Excuse me.
BJ: Correct. So we typically would replace a server about every five years. That's a pretty normal replacement cadence for us. We don't go below I apologize for using Nerd terms here, but we usually use Dell PowerEdge because it's a really good line of servers and we don't go below an R four X series. So right now they're R 450 and we do dual power supplies. The minimum cost of that server is somewhere between seven and $8,000. That's really our minimum cost to do.
Robbz: The server, and theirs probably was a bit bigger for the files they had to have.
BJ: They were pretty easy firm in that sense, but realistically they're spending 7200 over five years for this. We're able to get rid of their backup costs because, well, we backup Office 365 as part of our included managed service agreement. And if you aren't, you should be. Yeah, it's about the same cost as having them replace it, but it's $100 a month. So a quick recap and it's a lot more space.
Robbz: Right? A quick recap of what we talked about. We talked about the introduction or what cloud is. Simply, it's your computing instead of in your office in another location. We understand the different models, whether it be public, the big boys private some closer by reputable business or hybrid a little bit of everything or a little piece of each. I should say pros and cons of what each of these are potential drawbacks, cost differences, implications of using this that security is a concern no matter if it's in the cloud or not. And real world transitions of what it seems to be to plan out going to cloud, moving solutions into the cloud, and even gave an example of how we've done it in the past. Anything else? Perfect add before we wrap this up.
BJ: Oh goodness. Do you have any funny stories about tales from cloud tech support?
Robbz: I did have one in yesteryear, passed. I had a customer that heard in a company announcement that they're going to be moving their solution to the cloud. And she said, what was it? Something about does that mean my office is going to be moving? I'm a little confused. Not a real good one, but kind of showed that years ago. This was even worse than it is now for what the cloud means.
BJ: And that's it. If you have any questions about the cloud, please don't hesitate to ask us. Post anywhere. We'll probably be able to find it. We'd love feedback, and if we can answer any specific questions, we'd love to help.
Robbz: So go to businessplaybook.com. Bottom of the website, you'll find the link for Discord. And also this is in our Show Notes. Come join the discord. We can message you right here if you have actual world questions for us. Otherwise, the email and contact information is still in the show Notes. Love to hear from you.