The right cloud is the one drawn around your company
“Moving to the cloud” can mean a hundred different things - and not all of them are right for you. Xion IT Group provides its clients with capable, modern cloud services for every business need: from sharing information across a local network through to fully cloud-based infrastructure.
Certified skills
- Engineers specialised in virtualisation, who build private cloud platforms - the option preferred by companies that want the benefits of cloud while keeping full control of their own data;
- Dedicated consultants who follow the project from the start: assessing what you need, choosing the right platform, sizing it and estimating running costs.
The benefits you can actually measure
- Operational speed - resources available in minutes rather than weeks;
- Less travelling - staff reach the systems from any site, cutting both time and travel costs;
- A consistent standard of work for the whole team, in the office and on the move;
- Continuity - a local failure no longer stops the company.
Cloud and security belong together
Every cloud project we build is designed alongside IT security, remote backup and GDPR compliance: moving data does not mean you stop protecting it.
Public, private or hybrid, explained simply
- Public cloud — you pay for resources as you use them on global platforms: maximum elasticity, well suited to variable workloads and standard services such as mail and collaboration;
- Private cloud — dedicated infrastructure, ours or yours, virtualised to enterprise standard: maximum control over data and performance, the usual choice where GDPR requirements are demanding or applications are unusual;
- Hybrid — pragmatism: whatever suits the public cloud goes there, whatever is sensitive stays private, securely connected.
There is no answer that is right in the abstract — only the one that is right for your data, your workloads and your budget. Our job is to let you choose with the numbers in front of you: three-year running costs, regulatory requirements, and exit plans, because you have to be able to leave the cloud too.
The real calculation runs over three years
The comparison between staying on site and moving to the cloud is almost always done badly, because it sets two figures against each other that are not comparable: the price of a server and a monthly fee.
The honest calculation runs over three or five years. On one side it includes buying the hardware, the licences, the uninterruptible power supplies, cooling the room, electricity, the time spent managing it, replacement at end of life, and the risk of a failure. On the other, the fee, the connectivity you need — which often has to be upgraded — any charge for getting your data back out, and the fact that the fee grows as the company does.
When that calculation is genuinely carried out, the result is not a foregone conclusion in either direction. Quite often what comes out of it is a hybrid arrangement, and sometimes the right answer is to stay where you are.
The three questions that decide it, before cost
What happens when the line goes down? On site, a connectivity failure stops you reading your mail. In the cloud, it stops you working. This is the most important difference and the least considered: anyone moving everything to the cloud has to budget for a second line, and that cost belongs in the comparison.
Does the application tolerate distance? Some business systems were built to sit on the same network as their data and become irritatingly slow as soon as they are moved away from it. That needs testing beforehand, not discovering afterwards.
How do you get out? This is the question nobody asks when buying and that weighs most when leaving. Before signing, it should be written down in what format you can take your data back, how long it takes and what it costs. A supplier who will not answer that clearly is telling you something important.
Hybrid is not a compromise
In most of the companies we look after, the arrangement that works best is neither everything in nor everything out. Mail and collaboration sit well in the cloud, where redundancy is already included and management is minimal. The business system and the data used all day long are often better off close to the people using them. Backup belongs off site by definition, because its whole purpose is to survive whatever happens on site.
This is not settling for less: it is putting each workload where it costs least and delivers most.
The migration, step by step
- Assessment — what runs today, on what, with which dependencies: the map before the journey;
- Migration plan — what moves, in what order, with which windows of downtime, often none;
- Destination environment — built, tested and secured before anything is moved;
- Controlled migration — data and applications moved with checks at every step and the ability to go back;
- Tuning — after the first month, resources and costs are adjusted to real usage.
What actually changes for the company
Well-designed cloud infrastructure shows up in three ways: costs become predictable (fees instead of servers to depreciate and replace), continuity improves (local hardware failures stop being emergencies) and growth stops being a project — a new site or ten new users are configurations, not building work. All of it with backup and security designed alongside the infrastructure rather than bolted on afterwards.