Offices are shrinking, but the cloud offers room to grow

Adapting to the new normal

Working from home is fast becoming the new normal. Even though the direction of travel is clear, the wider impact of this change is less certain. As a result, many businesses are now considering how remote working will shape their requirements in a wide range of domains, including IT.

Just as sourcing a desk for every employee in the company may no longer be a consideration when selecting an office space, a growing number of businesses are asking whether it still makes sense to manage, power and cool a data center or server room on-premises. Over the last decade, leading cloud vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have demonstrated their ability to deliver levels of availability, security, flexibility—and above all, cost-efficiency—that outclass most on-premises environments. Companies are also considering how best to use their in-house IT personnel: why tie up valued team members in low-level administration and fire-fighting if they are better employed on value-add activities?

Cloud adoption takes off

Data is the fuel that powers global business, and an estimated 90 percent of all the data that exists today was created within the last two years alone. Migrating to the cloud is an effective way to solve the challenges associated with rapidly growing data volumes, to reduce the cost of long-term data retention, back-up and to ensure that important information will be available to the teams that need it 24/7.

Organisations are continuing to embrace hybrid-cloud architectures that enable sensitive data to remain inside the firewall while ensuring developers, analysts and data scientists are still free to be innovative using data-driven services in the cloud. At the same time, they are looking to cloud services and managed services providers to reduce low-level strain, freeing up IT administrators to better support business users—especially valuable in an age of remote working—and change-management projects.

Is cloud computing and a fully managed solution right for you?

To maximise the benefits of cloud and reduce risk during your cloud migration, it’s important to consider all the technologies within your IT environment. As well as determining which of these technologies can be migrated to the cloud with minimal configuration or architectural changes, a key aim is to identify opportunities to reduce the ongoing management and maintenance requirements for the new cloud environment which in turn should reduce cost. If key components of your infrastructure require a small number of hours to maintain each month, it may also make sense to select a fully managed service to deliver them.

A managed service solution is a particularly good fit for technologies or environments that typically require low maintenance. For all but the world’s largest businesses, retaining employees with the necessary skills to support every critical component in the stack is simply not economically viable. By choosing a managed service from a proven vendor, you can ensure that you have support resources on hand 24/7 to remediate any issues that might arise—whilst often decreasing your operational costs.

Selecting a proven partner

Your choice of IT service management vendor is just as important as your choice of cloud platform. Before you move mission-critical systems to a managed service in the cloud, it’s crucial to confirm that your vendor has the in-house skills and technical capabilities to deliver on your service-level requirements.

For more than 25 years, Northdoor plc has provided expert IT services that help businesses keep their information systems online 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With deep expertise that spans every part of the IT stack. Northdoor Managed Services come with rigorous service-level agreements, an ITIL-compliant service desk, and on-site support to get you back on your feet fast in a DR recovery scenario. We are also recognised experts in BI, AI, analytics and big data.

Throughout the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, Northdoor has helped clients by handling day-to-day administration of server, application, storage and data environments, releasing their in-house staff to focus on serving business users in the transition to new ways of working.

If your business is considering a move to cloud, or if you’re struggling to manage IT administration while also enabling the shift to remote working, Northdoor can help. For more information contact me at [email protected] or call 07833 291324.

www.northdoor.co.uk/solutions.infrastructure