How to get ahead
Taking all the learnings from this eBook, getting ahead and making a start is not easy. So it's important to break ideas down in to short term and long term goals. To help here are some strategic areas, both short and long term, to assist in your cloud journey.
Short term
Simplifying the number of tools used is going to be critical. Most organisations are using over eight different tools to manage their infrastructure. The goal for many is to get down to a single tool that covers BAU management and monitoring as well as cost optimisation.
This doesn’t mean dispensing with your support teams, instead it changes the dynamic from being full time BAU management, to one where you are only exception handling. This means more time available to provide higher value support to the business, concentrating more on customer experience.
Long term
Increasing training for cloud administrators is going to be key to staying ahead, and training isn’t just needed for the platform layer, but also applications. With tooling taking care of a majority of traditional tasks it will open up opportunities to redevelop applications into PaaS and serverless technologies to take full advantage of the stack.
And with an ever-looming skills shortage and an accelerating use of cloud computing, many customers are looking to partnering with technical providers to help them get the most out of the cloud without a significant investment internally being required, or at least offset. Partnering with a technical provider to assist in management will be an ever-increasing popular trend to allow customers access to expertise and accelerate their business needs.
And lastly, staying on top of overspend, best practice and overall consensus on how to proceed is going to be a driving force behind cloud for the foreseeable future.
Having processes and procedures around these areas, including cloud spending anomalies is going to be critical moving forwards.
& Introducing managed cloud
IA-Cloud from LABS is helping cloud customers to monitor, manage, govern and optimise their pre-dominant Azure environments, relieving pressure on IT departments.
Customers of IA-Cloud have realised significant savings from a cost optimisation and anomaly perspective, but perhaps more importantly has freed up valuable resources to focus the business on user experience and ultimately to provide a better service to customers. This shift in focus enables organisations to continue to compete with nimble, born-in-the-cloud disruptors by lowering overheads and increasing agility.
The ability to fully automate the onboarding of resources into monitoring, patching, backups and cloud optimisation as well as automated and evergreen architecture documentation, helps customers to reduce their cloud management costs by up to 46% and their cloud consumption by 30%.
And if that wasn’t enough, IA-Cloud now automatically validates your environment against industry standard benchmarks such as CIS, providing remediation suggestions via the built-in eConsultant to continuously improve your environment.
Installation of IA-Cloud is simple; delivered as a SaaS platform it takes just 30 minutes to install and will get to work immediately to monitor and manage your environment, and provide recommendations.
And for customers that feel they are lacking technical skills in Azure, IA-Cloud can now be extended to be provide a complete managed service offering for customers.
Managed Cloud from the Ultima Group utilises the IA-Cloud SaaS platform, but comes with a 24/7 management overlay of technical experts to help you get the best out of your cloud experience.
As part of this Ultima can provide customers with a no obligation Cloud Analyse service upfront, showing customers the benefits of IA-Cloud and/or Managed Cloud that is relevant to their business before getting started.
Contact the Ultima Group today to find out more.
[IA-Cloud] helps customers to reduce their cloud management costs by up to 46% and their cloud consumption by 30%."
LABS from the Ultima Group, based on existing customer data