Why a multi-cloud environment could be right for your business

For time immemorial, Google and Mirosoft have been in a battle to convince you that their suite of productivity applications (currently named Google Workspace and Microsoft 365) should be the only platform deployed across your entire business.

Let’s be completely honest, being on the same platform suite as your colleagues has many benefits, including improved communication and collaboration. Also, the added functionality between applications helps to make users more efficient and tasks easier.

But, a one platform solution may not suit all users, departments or entities across your entire company, especially where there is no actual collaborative or communicative benefit, or even worse, where it alienates them from their customer base.

So, why should one area of the business be made to work less efficiently just so everyone is on the same platform? Well, they don’t! Many companies are successfully using a multi-cloud environment (where different areas of the business are using Google and Microsoft platforms respectively). Here are a few examples of why moving to the multi-cloud could be in your future.

2020 has been a horrific year for businesses, with some sectors being hit much harder than others. Whilst this may seem to imply that bigger businesses would be more frugal with their spending, it also means that there are opportunities to acquire or merge with other companies in their sector, strengthening their position in the long run.

When mergers and acquisitions take place, there can be a huge surge to get everyone using the same processes and standards. One of these steps can be moving all users to the same platform.

This can cause an instant decrease in efficiency, as historic users of one platform try to work out how to properly use the new platform, in the middle of a time of great upheaval anyway.

Additionally, keeping the existing licenses means that you do not have to splash out on acquiring additional licenses. You can always move users across when the license runs out, and it gives employees one less process to learn in the initial months of a merger.

One of the biggest considerations when thinking about which platform to choose is which one will make it easier to communicate with customers, but customers in different regions and sectors may prefer to use one platform over the other.
For example, your customers in the Asia Pacific region predominantly use Google, but your US-based customers prefer Microsoft. Using both environments allows your business to cater to both markets, without hampering either.

You may think that choosing between Google or Microsoft is an either / or choice because they just aren’t compatible. We have all had issues converting a Word Doc to a Google Doc, or other format. But, that simple is not true anymore.

Both Google and Microsoft have been working hard to include added interoperability between the two suites. For example, you can open a Microsoft Word or Excel file in their Google counterpart and work on it seamlessly. Microsoft files can also be saved in Google Drive.

There are limitations of course, but the fact that both platforms have started working on better interoperability can only be good news for users.

The first thing we do is give you the freedom to migrate between domains easily. This means that, fundamentally, you aren’t locked into either vendor and can change to meet the requirements and convenience of your business.
If that means that your ecosystem has both a Google and Microsoft domain (or multiples of each), you can migrate individual users across the domains, with all of their data converted and available.
Our CloudM platform also gives you the ability to easily manage new users that have been migrated to a new domain, including automated processes that sign them up to mailing lists, shared documentation and calendars, and assign default licenses.

Read more about the benefits of the CloudM platform