I am a new partner. Our business has horizontal integrations that we would like to focus on. Some of those are Microsoft certification oriented. I am in charge of the department that handles these things. One of the projects we have designed for ourselves is to assess and possibly upgrade our office IT infrastructure. Very green so please bear with me.
We use Office 365, 2011 version of Dynamics SL (on-prem), Windows File Servers, Windows Domain Controllers (AD, DNS, DHCP, NTP, WINS, etc.), Windows 10 Pro Desktops, HP Server, HP SAN units, and some other things that I imagine are not that relevant to the conversation (I just wanted to give an idea of what the scale of the operation is CURRENTLY). LAN users are never more than 20-30 depending on if there is a meeting occurring with visitors and extras.
I am aware of two trains of thought when it comes to small business. Most of the people I have discussed network/server infrastructure with are confidently set on the idea that, due to the size of our needs and the size of our user count, all of our services should be migrated to the cloud if possible. Some of the values others have assigned to this type of "cloud infrastructure": Low to NO cost of server hardware infrastructure, no maintenance required, no upgrades required, always have the latest version of the application/software/platform, etc.
The other train of thought is of course run everything on-prem (or some sort of hybrid in between) and just make the right hardware/software decisions and live with those decision for however long your budget tells you that you have to live with it.
I guess my first question is: What is the actual best practice for a small business of less than 50 people (more like 25 actually but call it 50 for the purposes of this conversation)? If it's the cloud option, which I'm guessing it is, what does that infrastructure look like?
I have some ideas of what it may look like for us in particular, so maybe that's a good place to start? Also have some questions along the way I'm sure.......
Things I would think are included with a "cloud infrastructure" design:
- Office 365
- Some sort of cloud accounting system (We evaluated Dynamics 365 Business Central. It doesn't meet our needs. Dynamics 365 for Operations is a 20 seat minimum and I've been told minimum tens of thousands to implement if not hundreds of thousands. We are currently looking at Quickbooks Enterprise hosted)
- OneDrive accounts for file storage and file back-up
- On-prem Domain Controller w/Active Directory Connect for single sign-on, etc. and maybe client back-ups? (Not sure about the client back-ups).
There are other things that I'm sure I'm leaving out that are important to the final solution here, but I think the main issue at hand is what does the main "cloud infrastructure" look like for us going forward? Am I missing something? Can I remove something? Maybe I'm going down the wrong path of thought here?