Finally, the cloud is top-of-mind, and you’re ready to move basic or advanced workloads to the cloud for critical applications that can help to make your organization and your cloud services more efficient, productive and competitive.
But you face numerous challenges that keep moving the goalpost — from finding ways to protect your legacy IT investments throughout and after your cloud transformation, to deciding on whether to deploy hybrid cloud architecture or fully embrace the public cloud. These early decisions are difficult, but good decisions now can send you on a smooth path to simplicity and acceleration.
What if you could gain global visibility over all of your data center and cloud environments with insights and data visualization that could tell you plainly whether workloads require significant rework or just simple lift-and-shift? You could accelerate buy-in and make the right decisions for your cloud transformation, streamlining time to value. And your goalpost would probably stop moving.
As you decide on how to make the right decisions at this early stage, consider these seven goals or topics that my team of Azure experts and I have encountered in the numerous amount of cloud migrations that we manage each month at HOSTING. Our customers want to refresh or shake up their business models as they try to keep up with or jump ahead of competition. It doesn’t matter whether our customers are small, mid-sized or large organizations: most of their pains, solutions and use cases are similar. Cloud transformations create IaaS and SaaS parity across many business cases — from supporting PB-scale data growth for data ROI to bridging silos and optimizing cloud apps and analytics.
Goal 1: Accelerate innovation with Intelligent Workload Management and Continuous Delivery
In the age of cloud and mobility, traffic is unpredictable — yet your customers, clients or partners expect you to deliver predictable performance at any scale. With the flexibility of the Microsoft® Azure cloud platform that is managed with our services and unified cloud management, you can help to ensure that your workload management is intelligent enough to help you rethink your on-premises and cloud infrastructure speed, economics, scalability, availability and resilience. Now, you can bring business and IT goals closer together as you brainstorm without barriers.
- Use Azure public cloud for cost-effective petabyte scalability
- Azure private cloud for enhanced security
- On-premises/hybrid architectures for special needs, i.e., database clusters.
In addition, to keep your business-critical cloud apps/SaaS up and running, we offer an array or high availability and recovery services that help to ensure that our customers won’t be impacted by individual component failures, or even by complete data center outages.
Goal 2: Simplify DevOps
Microsoft® Azure managed by HOSTING makes it easy to roll out multi-tenant, cloud-based SaaS applications with your existing IT resources. Use any development tool on our managed platform as long as the resulting executables run on Windows or Linux.
- Our ITIL-certified operations staff work closely with our cloud services and SaaS customers to develop customized support procedures tailored for their unique architectures and business requirements.
Goal 3: Do more with your existing infrastructure
Accelerate time-to-market with your business-critical applications as you gain the ability with our managed Azure cloud platform to launch virtual machines in minutes. Now, your legacy IT investments can run more efficiently, while you avoid increasing your technical debt.
Goal 4: Save time, lower costs
Support Azure cloud workloads without rushing to increase your IT resources and budgets. Reduce TCO and convert more CAPEX into OPEX as you pay only for what you use in Azure clouds. Pay less during business as usual, yet always keep assets and data accessible, available and usable during traffic spikes – whenever they may happen. Can you say “no more 3 a.m. calls?”
Goal 5: Transform infrastructure from end-to-end with Azure
Whether you want to transform at your own pace, or fully embrace the cloud now, we understand that you want your cloud-enablement to deliver business case success now and long into the future. That’s why we offer tiered services that give you a “big picture” solution for all of your infrastructure needs. Services include:
- Design Azure clouds that can help accelerate innovation: Discover. Analyze. Architect.
- Build purpose-built Azure clouds: Scalable. Proven.
- Migrate to Azure without headaches: Plan. Monitor. Test. Cutover
- Manage Azure with proven expertise: We do the heavy lifting. You focus on business-critical apps.
- Protect with our Cloud Always On™: Reliable. Secure. Compliant.
Goal 6: Prioritize customer experience
And because your cloud-enablement with Microsoft® Azure is a journey, you want to work with a dedicated cloud-enablement partner that is focused on Azure success. My team provides 24/7/365 support to help guide you with our expertise and track record with Azure success. We eat our own dog food in that, at HOSTING, we also transformed our entire infrastructure from end-to-end with Microsoft® Azure.
Goal 7: Adopt a Unified Cloud Strategy
Plan for your future with a level of confidence that only a fully Unified Cloud Strategy can help deliver. We built our migration and managed Azure
solutions from the ground up to simplify your Unified Cloud Strategy — including gaining visibility and control over on-premises and hybrid cloud
environments.
- Unify visibility and insights – Our Unified Monitoring Solutions provide complete end-to-end visibility, data visualizations and reporting into your new cloud and hybrid environments. Network and server monitoring tools deliver clear insights into usage, performance and cost, along with expert analysis to help enhance performance and reduce unnecessary spend.
- Unify management – Easily architect and configure, provision and de-provision your infrastructure for optimal workload management. Now, throttle unpredictable and growing traffic with less downtime.
Accelerate and simplify your Azure cloud solutions with HOSTING. We’ve got your cloud-enablement covered with tiered services: Design. Build. Migrate. Manage. Protect.
–Mike McCracken, VP of Advanced Solutions, HOSTING
Mike leads HOSTING’s cloud migration services and unified cloud strategy solutions. His team of Azure experts design the right managed Azure cloud transformations that can help your current infrastructure do more, faster—while enabling cloud scalability, cloud speed and cloud availability for next-generation apps and services.
Learn More about managed Microsoft® Azure with HOSTING. Download our eBook: “A HOSTING Trail Guide to Azure Migrations”.