The future is serverless.
Or is it?
If you consume any media with advertisements, whether it is print, digital, or television, you would be hard pressed not to have seen some sort of cloud service advertised, whether this is online accounting from Xero or Quickbooks, or Squarespace for your online store. You’re likely using some sort of cloud service already and may not even realise it.
What (most) organisations don’t realise is that they could run their entire business using services like this. If you are already using Microsoft Office365 or Google Apps Suite, then you’ve got probably the trickiest part done!
Since the COVID-19 pandemic more organisations have seen the benefits of allowing remote working for their employees, and quite frequently, it has changed their entire business practices, forever.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we helped an organisation of over 150 employees transform from an entirely office based workforce with 15 locations, to fully remote within 4 hours.
How did they do this?
This organisation had fully embraced a serverless model in 2017 when they joined us as a client. MCL Services carried out a transformation project, taking them from on-premises servers to a fully hosted and managed service based solution – including email, fileshares and accounting software. They no longer need to worry about hardware, warranties, internet SLAs etc. they just use the software as they need it.
Changing to remote working, for the majority of their staff, was business as usual – they just took their equipment home and connected it to their home network and the most challenging part was usually connecting it to their home internet connection (It’s not always straightforward!) – our secure remote working solution made sure that they were protected just the same as they were in the office. For some key personnel they needed VPN (Virtual Private Network) access configured on their computer as they accessed particularly sensitive data on a legacy application.
What’s the benefits of serverless?
Serverless doesn’t mean going back to pen and paper – despite how many people would say they prefer that! It’s about focusing on the services that are being consumed rather than what the services are running on.
Not too many people care about how a petrol pump works when they are filling their car up, they just know they press the lever and petrol comes out of the end. They don’t know that there’s a vast infrastructure of pipes, pumps, measuring devices and multiple safety systems that exist just to let them press that lever and have the fuel come out.
Having to manage, or even think about servers would be the equivalent of personally confirming that all of the equipment is operating correctly, carrying out the regular maintenance and performing safety checks to use before even considering lifting the nozzle. Unless you’re really weird, you don’t want to do that, you just want to fill up your car and get on with the things that you need to do in your average busy work day.
By transitioning to a hosted service, or using the cloud services available like Xero instead of Sage Line 50 (other accounts packages are avaialable) you’ll find your days become easier as you don’t have to think about replacing that server in 18months because it’s started making a weird noise, or having all of your employees be unable to work because Jim in Accounts tripped the circuit breaker in the kitchen that’s shared with your comms cabinet. By the way, both of those examples are real things that we’ve had to help customers with.