Headquartered in Aberdeen with regional offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Mother Technologies Ltd is a well-established IT and telecom services provider. The firm has 20 members of staff and an annual turnover of around £2.5m. The majority of its customers are small to medium-sized businesses with completely outsourced IT support functions.

Companies are increasingly choosing to farm out their IT departments, opting instead for all the comfort and support vouchsafed by a Cloud services provider.

But they need to look before they leap, warns Steve Redhead, managing director of Mother Technologies, because the devil is so often in the detail.

“Right now, we are finding that people are getting caught out big time by the Cloud,” he said. “By that I mean they are being wooed by headline figures which appear to be attractive, but don’t necessarily reveal the full picture or the full impact of what they are about to do.”

Frequently advertisers offering Cloud services only highlight one element, or the element they are trying to promote, rather than everything the customer really needs to consider if they are moving to the Cloud, perhaps because the whole service isn’t within the remit of the would-be provider.

And the big one, the hidden cost that can suddenly emerge from the shadows, is the cost of actually connecting to the data centre-cum-host that is no longer on their own premises.

They are going to have to multiply their connectivity ten-fold in terms of capacity and in terms of resilience.

However, customers often haven’t been advised about the need for a strong connection and hence haven’t budgeted for the significant cost involved. They are left to figure that out for themselves.

“Here at Mother Technologies, though, we are a solutions company with IT, telecommunications, the Cloud and connectivity in our portfolio and as such, we support them from data centre to desktop – and we are always, always up front about how much that is going to cost,” he said.

The arguments in favour of migration are compelling. For starters, it replaces capital expenditure with a steady drip of monthly outlay that, while not necessarily being a cheaper alternative in the long run, allows businesses to keep their money in the bank.

Steve said: “Every three or four years businesses have huge spends to replenish hardware, and then there’s the large sums needed for back-up facilities and break fixes, the type of thing that happens unexpectedly…

“So it’s no wonder that so many businesses are saying ‘to hell with this’. They don’t want to have to look after a huge amount of tech.

“They want to outsource all that to a support centre, rent the equipment and have one flat figure they can budget with.”

 

There is one particularly good piece of news for those thinking about migrating to the Cloud some time soon and that is the Government has set aside just short of £68m worth of support.

Around £52m of that had already been paid out by the end of October, but that means there are still millions left in the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme.

In a nut shell, companies preparing to make the move can apply for a grant of up to £2,500 to offset the cost of the leased line installation. “In our experience,” he said, “when we are applying for the vouchers for our customers we are getting the full £2,500 almost every time and that’s a good saving in anybody’s book.”