Moving is a complicated process. Especially if you are the one that is charge of your IT department’s move. If you are looking for ways to keep your move as painless as possible, there are a few suggestions that might be helpful to you. Here are five ways you can better manage your IT department’s move.
Make Sure to Budget for Downtime
Being able to handle downtime can be the most critical aspect of your move. This means planning far in advance when critical services and data servers are going to be moved. This planning can help your users to be ready for the downtime during the move.
Plan out when the best time to move is. That might mean moving some things or users on the weekends so that they do not experience any interruptions.
Leverage the Cloud
Your move might be the best time for you to consider moving some services to the cloud. Data storage, access and email are three critical things that all of your users are going to need. While there are some valid arguments for keeping those services in-house, many cloud service providers can offer you the space and security that you need.
Moving to the cloud also means that your physical location is no longer important. Your office move can go off without a hitch as all of the critical services your users need are already in a place that is independent of their location.
Upgrade Your Infrastructure
Moving to a new office can also be a great opportunity to upgrade aging infrastructure. If your IT support team has been putting off upgrades, then your office move might be a great time to plan out and implement them.
Instead of bringing old hardware along with you, take the move as an opportunity to upgrade to things like business grade wireless access points, new firewalls, CAT 6 cabling and Gigabyte switches.
You might even be able to sneak some of your upgrades into the move budget!
Move Your Phone System to Voice Over IP
More and more companies are moving away from using traditional phone services and switching over to VoIP. VoIP is affordable, easier to implement and offers many benefits over traditional phone services.
Your move provides you with a perfect opportunity to transfer your old phone service over to a VoIP solution. And since phone numbers are portable with VoIP, you can keep your old number even when you move out of town.
Plan, Then Execute
You are going to want to get all of your important players on board for the move planning. Your IT service providers can be critical in helping a move go smoothly.
Consider Help from Technical Consulting Firms
Looking for a little additional help with your move? Why not consider using experts like U.S. Computer Connection. Whether you are in Fairfield, Connecticut or Westchester, New York, we can help you with suggestions on how best to leverage your move for your IT department. Contact us today!