"When going to the Cloud we need to talk less about the technology and more about the business impact," Schelp says. "We have been challenged to provide more effective and integrated collaboration capabilities for SBS. It's a growing demand within the business and the current system is mainly used for e-mail only and required an upgrade."

Following a regular IT product selection process, Schelp says a decision was reached whereby SBS would migrate off its existing Novell GroupWise e-mail and groupware suite to Microsoft's Office 365 Cloud service for some 1300 user accounts.

SBS is already using Microsoft Office, but Schelp is interested in the integration with the extended Microsoft collaboration suite including Exchange, communication and SharePoint portal services.

"The second decision was how to deploy the selected solution," Schelp says. "We looked at on-premise, hosted and Cloud based options. Cloud was the most efficient and effective option for us. I had to decide whether I would build up internal skills and resources or use a Cloud solution that someone else operated."

The first leg of the journey is e-mail, which Schelp says is possible due to its "commoditised and standardised" nature and less of a requirement to be customised for SBS's business needs.