By
Mendy Green
December 18, 2022
•
20 min read
Business
“Should my business be going to Cloud?”
This is one of the most popular questions that comes up in my conversations with clients, and like every other question I get, I like to answer it with “It depends”.
Before we can address this, we need to address the ongoing struggle between IT Professionals and Marketing Professionals. This was cleverly outlined in the classic Project Management meme
We won’t get too far into the specifics of this as Marketing can be a post all by itself, but suffice to say, the…let’s call it exuberance to sell something new, tends to make for overly aggressive messaging targeting the Stakeholders which does not generate tingly-friendly feelings on the people who actually have to implement, support, or answer questions about the technical specifics. This is true no matter if the “Expert” person is at your company or the company the marketing person is sitting at. If you need a further demonstration of what this looks like you can watch the skit on YouTube called “The Expert” which should give you an idea of what frame of mind to approach this question with
Keeping this in mind we need to immediately increase our level of skepticism when we hear about Cloud Computing (or really any new technology).
Let’s switch tracks for a moment. One of the things I always talk about is how there’s at least two sides to everything. Literally you can take a specific item, scenario, concept, etc. examine it and you’ll see two or more sides that reflect or are directly opposite to each other. In business finances for example we have Operating costs and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). Traditionally Operating costs were made up of things like Rent for the office, Utilities, supplies and things like that. Supplies would include the cost of equipment (such as computers) Utilities would include cost of the internet and so on. COGS would be made up of how much money the business would need to spend, in order to provide the service that they offer. This is essentially two sides to the same thing (money being spent), but you track them separately because they help you break down the cost of running the business vs the cost of providing services.
In other words, Operating Expenses can be broken down to the point where you would assign a Per Dollar amount for each Employee that you have, and COGS would be broken down and assigned a Per Dollar amount for each Customer
Now let’s get back to the point of this. Cloud, like everything else, has 2 or more (way more actually) sides. There’s Infrastructure as a Service offerings, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service, and so on and so forth and all of these items get mixed up and placed into the “Cloud” category. If you dig into what Cloud actually is, you’ll find that it’s just…rented computers. Really. If you’re skeptical, you can read more on this here from one of the bigger software platforms on their reasons why they’re leaving the cloud.
The questions we’d want to answer so that we can determine if you should be moving to the cloud are as follows.
Would you be moving your Operating Expenses to the cloud or your COGS. Specifically, are you providing an online service to your clients that requires you to rapidly scale up if you were to grow, or that allows you to measure out the cost of running in the cloud against the number of users you’re servicing?
Running in almost any cloud has pricing that is broken down to the minute, generally speaking. This is one of the big things marketing likes to tout “Scale up or down as needed, so it’s very cost effective”. Cost effective compared to running them 24/7 sure, but not cost effective compared to buying hardware. Marketing is selling you on the idea that if you needed to turn down services, you can do rapidly and save money with it off, but if you never need to turn down services, and your scaling doesn’t happen rapidly, then you’re actually spending way more over the same period of time of hardware life. Up to 4 or 5 times the amount potentially.
Do you have a need either from a compliance standard or your own security policy for enhanced security, physical auditing, a requirement to be highly available or a guaranteed uptime of 4 or more 9s (99.99%)?
Here is where it starts making sense to consider, although the question of finding a datacenter that will rent you hardware or allow you to place hardware vs running in something like Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS is still debatable. In the end the level of redundancies that exist in the cloud or datacenter are harder to build (read, more costly) than using an infrastructure that is already built and essentially being shared. This isn’t a new phenomenon, if you’ve read my article on the MSP Business Fallacy, or even just paid attention in the world the idea of pooling resources to save on costs is a well-established and very successful pattern. This is something that can range on a spectrum from sharing power costs, to sharing full on hardware and running your services on segregated containerized workloads.
Are you concerned about control of your data. Specifically, does it matter to you if your data is physically on equipment that you solely own and control, or is your business okay with the data being placed onto equipment owned and controlled by a trusted Third Party
Data sovereignty is an important part of the equation, even if you do trust it to a third party, the question of which region and where it is physically located is still an issue. In the end the agreements you sign with vendors and clients state that the data you hold for them is your responsibility to protect and keep safe and you do not have the right to assign that responsibility to anyone else. These are all concerns that should be evaluated and addressed in your assessment of moving to cloud.
In the end there’s no real good right answer, as most of these questions are ones you’ll need to decide for your business. I’ve outlined a table below to help with the decision matrix, but it is still only just a suggestion.
Like many MSPs, Rising Tide invests in our people through access to books, trainings, conferences, and certifications. At its core, this is not education for education’s sake: rather, we believe the best technical work starts with curiosity, and we consistently seek ways to foster curiosity as a skill. You see, we think the best solutions come not just from curiosity about technology, but curiosity about each other, about our clients, and about our community. We want to be known as people who ask better questions, understand others' perspectives with clarity, and are always hungry for more. We believe that personal growth will always drive technical and professional success for our team, and as a result, our clients.
So how does a business foster curiosity? Curiosity is not something you learn from an SOP, a certification, or a conference. It’s something you develop by creating the time and space for yourself and your people to feel safe to speak up, to ideate, to build, and to iterate.
We are doing our best to build a culture of curiosity and progress in as many ways as possible, not just through structured education, but in choosing tools, conversations, and activities where we can intentionally seek to learn from and about each other and the world around us. The last part is very important at a core level: we believe every person brings a different background, toolkit, and perspective that strengthens and deepens our own, even — or especially! — when we disagree.
As a fully remote team of 6, this can be pretty difficult to do since we can’t go out for lunch or have regular physical touchpoints other brick-and-mortar businesses may enjoy. So, one of the standard ways we cultivate this is through scheduled daily and weekly team conversations where we review customer issues, books or videos, conferences attended, or other interesting things we’ve seen that we want to share.
Most recently, we chose to essentially start a book club where we would read The Go-Giver by Bob Burg, together, and to invite clients and friends to review it with us on a weekly call. It was important to us that as a team expectation, we should make sure no one felt the demand too great on top of weekly work expectations. Thus, we decided on reading one chapter (7-10 pages) a week, to make sure that it felt accessible to everyone. (Reading ahead is absolutely allowed and encouraged, but we will only discuss one chapter a week!)
The next question for a book club is: how do you facilitate conversation in a way that allows for people to share what was meaningful to them, or to join in the conversation even if they didn’t get a chance to read? In preparing for our book meetings, I sought out online resources with simple chapter-by-chapter discussion questions. However, as a very easy read, it seemed that most questions online covered concepts that spanned multiple chapters, which encouraged reading ahead and missing perhaps some smaller ideas worth savoring in each chapter.
Honestly, we figure we’re not alone in this desire to have simple questions and to walk carefully through conversations, so we've decided to share our own discussion questions, chapter-by-chapter! These questions are written without consideration for future chapters of the book and are meant to help bring in conversation about the topics and themes specifically covered in the given chapter. These questions are open-ended and if you’re facilitating, we encourage you to take the stance of no-wrong-answers, just as an impartial listener. You never know what perspectives or fresh ideas may come out of conversation.
Check out The Go-Getter Chapter One Discussion Questions here.
We’ll continue to add discussion questions and commentary on the book club as we move forward. Next things I’d like to try is to offer facilitation to a team member who has read ahead, to help them stretch their muscles of asking questions and building conversations. What other ideas should we tie in?
Want to hang out in these conversations with the Rising Tide team? We meet Fridays at 9:30 AM ET to talk through important business, technological, and communal developments, and for the next 14ish weeks, The Go-Giver! If you’re an MSP owner, consultant, or service professional who wants to grow your team’s emotional intelligence alongside your technical skill, you’re welcome here.
Reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Rising Tide Fridays Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity: no prep required.
If you’ve already read Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity, you know that at Rising Tide, we don’t host book clubs for the sake of reading. We use them as an excuse to talk, to listen, and to practice curiosity together.
The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann is the first book that we've chosen to explore together in this way. Each week, we’re reading one short chapter together and using a few open-ended questions to spark real conversation: no lectures, no wrong answers, just reflection.
Below are our discussion prompts for Chapter One: “The Go-Getter.”
They’re written for teams like ours: busy, service-minded, sometimes too practical for their own good...who want to slow down long enough to notice what these stories have to teach.
How this guide is different from others you'll find online: We keep it chapter-focused. Every set of questions focuses only on the current chapter so there is no foreshadowing, no jumping ahead, no “we’ll get to that in Chapter 7.” The goal is to slow down and savor the smaller ideas that get lost when you rush to the big themes, and we're going to make sure that team members that are "behind" have enough data points to connect the dots and contribute even if they're not caught up to the current reading.
Use them however you like. Whether you’re reading along with us or just looking for a fresh team conversation starter, we hope these questions help you stretch a little, think differently, and see something new in yourself or your work.
If you tweak or add questions, tell us at partners@risingtidegroup.net. We’ll keep improving this tool for other MSP teams.
Creatures of a day! What is anyone?
What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days. (Pythian 8)
Want to hang out in these conversations with the Rising Tide team? We meet Fridays at 9:30 AM ET to talk through important business, technological, and communal developments, and for the next 14ish weeks, The Go-Giver! If you’re an MSP owner, consultant, or service professional who wants to grow your team’s emotional intelligence alongside your technical skill, you’re welcome here.
Reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Rising Tide Fridays Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity: no prep required.
This release didn’t come with any headline grabbers—but for those deep in Halo, it delivered a handful of quality-of-life improvements and some thoughtful backend fixes. Below are the features worth your attention, especially if you're in billing, approvals, or building project automation.
Watch here now: https://youtube.com/live/WGnJXYeSxN4
Delegate Approvals for Tickets | v2.190 #830512 | 2:28
Ticket approvers can now assign delegates directly from the agent app ticket detail screen. Great for ITSM or structured orgs, but less relevant for fast-moving MSPs unless you're running approvals regularly.
Manual Proration Made Invoice-Ready | v2.190 #823611 | 4:18
A new checkbox on manual proration entries lets them show up in the invoicing screen immediately. Particularly useful for mid-cycle adjustments to annual billing, like licensing or domains.
Zero Draft Invoice Handling | v2.190 #819999 | 6:41
Halo will now ignore draft invoices created in Xero, preventing clutter and accidental syncing. You'll need to enable this in the Xero integration webhook settings.
Receive Stock Before PO Approval | v2.190 #829771 | 9:04
You can now receive items before a purchase order is approved. Risky for strict workflows but may fit fast-paced environments where hardware urgency overrides red tape.
Auto-Issue Items from Actions | v2.190 #837101 | 10:21
Set up actions to issue specific inventory items without user selection. Makes fixed-fee tickets more maintainable. Bug alert: doesn't yet work with quick actions—still requires a workaround.
Ticket ID in PDF Template Item Tables | v2.190 #837112 | 12:39
PDF templates can now pull the associated ticket ID into item tables—helpful for clarity in documentation, reporting, or client-facing PDFs.
Read-Only Appointment Subjects | v2.190 #829744 | 17:43
Admins can lock appointment subjects to match the ticket/project. It’s a small control that helps standardize records across large teams.
Editable Invoice Line Contract Links | v2.190 #823492 | 20:41
You can now edit the contract tied to a specific invoice line—especially valuable if you're tracking profitability across services with multiple contracts.
Prevent RMM from Changing Device Types | v2.190 #821917 | 24:58
ConnectWise RMM imports won't overwrite an existing device type anymore, assuming you check the new box.
QuickBooks Name Collision Workaround | v2.190 #829321 | 26:05
Halo now checks for matching item names before syncing, and links them rather than creating duplicates. A clever patch for a QuickBooks API issue.
Ticket Type as Rule Outcome | v2.190 #831422 | 27:28
You can now set ticket type via rule outcomes. Great for automating triage flows or conversions between types during lifecycle changes.
Team Custom Fields in Details Tab | v2.190 #831994 | 31:13
You can finally surface custom fields tied to teams directly in ticket details. Limited use cases for now, but it’s a step toward richer internal data visibility.
Granular Attachment Permissions | v2.190 #829812 | 32:36
Admins can now control who can view, edit, upload, and download attachments—down to the ticket type and role level.
Track Completion of Sales Lines | v2.190 #832113 | 33:58
Sales order lines can be manually or automatically marked as “Complete.” Adds helpful clarity, especially when you're tracking partial progress across installs or shipments.
Runbook Execution Modes (Parallel/Sequential) | v2.190 #830301 | 35:27
Control how runbooks trigger: run steps in parallel for speed or in series to avoid conflicts and ensure data accuracy.
Column Profiles for Invoices & Quotes | v2.190 #834755 | 44:01
Column profiles now work on sales orders, quotes, and invoices. You can personalize the data you see—and what you hide—for cleaner views.
Runbook Stats Tab | v2.190 #830996 | 35:27
Basic run metrics are now visible in a tab. Not yet robust for reporting, but a decent glance for usage and debugging.
For easier tracking, check out haloreleases.remmy.dev to filter and search HaloPSA updates by ID, version, and keyword. And join us on August 5th for a show with Robbie and Mendy: https://youtube.com/live/ApiYEmWJsPU!