I was wondering - how feasible would it be to replace all of a companies' on-site servers, for the most part, with cloud based servers using Azure? I'm talking SMB space here, not enterprise, and the company I'm specifically referring to is fairly small on the server side, and their systems are beginning to be dated, and as we recently acquired their IT infrastructure from another company, is not up to par with our standards.
The company in question has already adopted the cloud via Office 365, and their on-premise servers consist of 5 primary functions:
- Active Directory/DNS/DHCP/Print Mgmt
- RDS server host
- Managed AV server
- Time Clock Management
- ERP system
The ERP system would stay on premise, as it is entirely provider managed and has free updates, but theoretically, I would like to look into moving all of their services to the cloud, but I'm concerned that moving the entire AD/DHCP/Print server to the cloud would cause more harm than good, and that the RDS server would be too costly due to the amount of memory and processing power needed, and that their thin clients would be affected greatly by both of these servers moving to the cloud.
At the same time, I'm wondering if maybe I'm overcomplicating things, and that the site-to-site VPN tunneling that can be accomplished through Azure would make the difference completely transparent.