By Vic Levinson

This past July, I was cleaning my garage. I reached to pick up a tool and fell on my left side. I hit the floor hard and managed to tear my rotator cuff and a bunch muscles in my shoulder and bicep.

What was amazing was how I reacted to it. I didnt run to the emergency room. I spent the next few months uncomfortable, not being able to move freely and not really able to resume normal activity. Finally, after three months, my wife convinced me that I didnt have to live this way and that I really should see the orthopedist. In about six months, I will be as good as new and able to function better.

This led me to think about the cloud. Sometimes, businesses have events that dislocate them. Not major events something more mundane. Routine” is the way that I was affected by cleaning the garage an ordinary event that had unintended negative consequences. For a business, this can be as simple as the lack of remote data storage, the need to spin up new servers for specific applications, the pain of managing an in-house MS Exchange or network operating systems that are at end of life.

Failure to pay immediate close attention to these routine activities means that the enterprise will limp along with limited movement and impaired abilities. Kind of like a dull ache not enough to cause the powers that be to take immediate action, but certainly enough to limit the businesss agility.

As my insightful and wise wife told me, You dont have to live this way.” Today, we have an almost immediate cure. The role of the channel partner/agent/provider is like the orthopedist. My message to my patients” is simple. You don’t have to understand cloud servers any more than as a patient, I understand how to operate on a rotator cuff. I would never consider performing surgery on myself, why would you consider doing this with your business? A doctor that treats himself has a fool for a patient.

As agents, we can diagnose and fix problems with the appropriate providers. The cure will allow the business to resume operations better than before. We can spin up servers in the cloud from a variety of different providers with different competencies, offerings and price points. We can host almost anything and everything virtually and as-a-service. Whether we are talking about disaster recovery-as-a-service, printer management-as-a-service, security-as-a-service, desktops-as-a-service, communications-as-a-service the list goes on. The cure is specific to the business’s pain. It is not a “magic pill”. 

I tend to see the recovery period from moving to the cloud as the period of measured time for return on investment. Like a skilled surgeon, if we do it right, the patient resumes life better than before.

Founder and president of

Prime Telecommunications
,Vic Levinson has more than 20 years of industry experience as an interconnect and authorized reseller for Avaya and Allworx, hosted IP telephony solutions connectivity and cloud applications. He has been instrumental in setting up the channel marketing program for SNET Communications, a Chicago-based hosted IP telephony provider. He is also a member of the 2013-14 Channel Partners Advisory Board.