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One of my roles at CITI is to conduct audits of our clients’ IT infrastructure. This process is a requirement for the intake of new clients as it provides us the opportunity to assess needs and make recommendations for a network that is initially unfamiliar to us. Clients who are already receiving CITI infrastructure support also sometimes request the service. It provides an overview of network health and network effectiveness that does not necessarily emerge in day to day operations. It’s a little like wanting a physical from your doctor even though you’ve already seen her plenty for coughs and aches. The tech audit can frequently uncover an underlying issue that may not have been immediately apparent, or help identify potential efficiency gains.

One recommendation I’ve been making in these network audits recently regards shifting services from local servers to hosted solutions.  Moving services to the “cloud” gets a lot of IT media hype these days, but it really does make sense for a number of our clients, for some of their services.

• One example is email services. It’s true that the software licenses required to set up an Exchange server are almost free through TechSoup pricing, but the cost of owning and operating an Exchange server is not incidental nor is the cost of paying CITI or another IT provider to set one up. For smaller organizations, paying a per person monthly fee for similar service hosted on the Internet is often less expensive.

• Moving organization file sharing to the cloud is a less common recommendation, but one that we consider more and more. A hosted file sharing system often increases remote accessibility and generally comes with functionality not included in a standard local Windows file share (such as versioning and edit tracking).

• While somewhat outside the scope of an infrastructure audit, another frequent recommendation is to consider moving specific application needs to hosted solutions, whether it’s a CRM database or a corporate Intranet.

The cloud works because the resources supporting it have an economy of scale (shared among many users) with which local services often can’t compete. And the high levels of bandwidth available today allow hosted services to have a performance comparable to that of their local versions.  It’s not a solution for all situations and we still believe in installing local servers, but cloud computing is often a compelling option we want our clients to explore.