Moving your critical infrastructure to the cloud isn’t as hard as you think Cloud adoption rates have continued to rise through 2018. Having been the driving force behind digital transformation for small and medium sized businesses, it is predicted that this year will see a tipping point for enterprise cloud adoption.
According to Forrester, this year will see over 50% of enterprise workloads moved to the cloud. This prediction is supported by the findings of a LogicMonitor survey published earlier this year, in which respondents foresee 83% of workloads will be in the cloud by 2020. The survey suggests 41% will be running on public cloud platforms, with 20% using private cloud and a further 22% adopting a hybrid approach.
The naysayers that predicted cloud would have limited appeal to medium-large enterprises have had to admit that the cloud “bubble” is not going to burst. Adoption rates have continued to grow year-on-year as organisations of all sizes seek to take advantage of the reliability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness that cloud brings.
While these benefits are widely accepted, some organisations still feel a degree of reticence around making the jump to a cloud first strategy. This may be because of a perceived gap between what ‘good’ looks like (i.e. the ability to move their desired apps to the cloud) and the realities of budget, skills and resource constraints. For some, this makes a cloud-first strategy something that organisations pay lip service to, rather than committing to digital transformation.
There are two other reasons that organisations often cite when asked about their hesitance to move: Firstly, the belief that their critical applications are not cloud ready, and secondly a desire to maximise ROI on legacy technology – adopting the cloud for new tech only.
One or more of these reasons may ring true for your organisation, but we’d like to point out that you can have the best of all worlds – maximise the returns on your legacy investment, migrate your business-critical apps to the cloud and realise the cost, scale and availability benefits of cloud infrastructure.
‘Traditional’ vs. ‘cloud built’ applications
The business applications market has been experiencing its own revolution in recent years. Larger organisations are effectively re-writing traditional apps in a native cloud environment; creating cloud-scale, container-based applications, rather than an on-premises solution based within a single OS.
Cloud-scale, container-based apps (like Netflix or Salesforce) can run in hyper-scaler environments on public cloud infrastructure. The sheer volume of containers used (thousands) means these applications can be rapidly scaled up and down. It also means they are incredibly resilient, even if running on low-level SLA hardware, as they can tolerate a lot of the underlying hardware going offline without affecting performance.
In comparison, most small-medium sized organisations don’t have access to the budget or development resource required to transition their legacy apps in to cloud-scale apps. As a result, they are more likely to rely upon traditional software applications.
However, this does not mean your apps aren’t cloud ready. For traditional business-critical applications that require 100% uptime, private cloud infrastructure or colocation of your hardware in a third-party data centre can deliver the same benefits of scalability and availability.
A hybrid approach
With applications at different stages in their lifecycle, your cloud adoption strategy is likely to feature a phased migration. Between their current and desired state, organisations will migrate some systems early to take advantage of improvements in availability, security and scalability.
But there’s no need to stop there. Legacy applications are seen to hold companies back, but this shouldn’t be the case. Moving these apps now to a Private Cloud (eliminating the need to re-build them) provides a true cloud first strategy through this blended, hybrid approach.
Many of your applications can be moved sooner than you think and Thrive’s team is ready to advise you on just this. Speak to us to find out more about them.
Four vital criteria when choosing a virtual meetings solution While email remains the most ubiquitous form of communication, with worldwide traffic set to hit 281.1 billion emails per day by the end of 2018, it isn’t the ‘be all and end all’ of office communiqué. Information can get lost, messages misinterpreted and deadlines missed. This doesn’t exactly make for a collaborative environment.
As workforces are becoming widely dispersed, with team members working together in the office, from home and across borders, virtual meeting solutions are recognised as an excellent way for people to connect and collaborate irrespective of where they work.
You may think that deploying a solution out-of-the-box is a quick and easy way to achieve greater collaboration within your organisation, but without the correct planning and management it’s a goal you’ll struggle to achieve.
To help you on your way, we’ve put together a list of what you need to watch out for when choosing a virtual meetings solution for your business.
1. Don’t deploy a solution that doesn’t fit
Checking that your organisation would benefit from a virtual meetings solution may sound like an obvious first step, yet many decision makers will fall into the trap of assuming that a problem needs fixing without talking to their colleagues first. Inevitably, this leads to them implementing something that is poorly received and may not solve anything.
Asking your teams how they communicate on an every-day basis, where they struggle and what they think can be improved, ensures that the solution complements your own bespoke needs. It also helps you build your business case by demonstrating the value it can bring to staff.
2. Keep users top of mind – now and in the future
Making your users’ lives easy must be the top priority of your project; after all, they will use the technology every day. Providing them with a solution that can be used across all their devices, permits them to share files, thoughts and ideas securely and ties into other systems they use in their everyday working lives, will help drive adoption as well as increase productivity and satisfaction.
As this is a solution you’ll look to keep for years to come, you should make sure that it will suit the needs of your future workforce, which will be made up of tech-savvy millennials to whom flexibility and workplace satisfaction are key drivers.
3. Take time to form your strategy
Without a uniform strategy, there’s always a danger that your staff will go away and choose their own tools. This problem can be amplified when different teams all pick different tools from each other; sharing knowledge across these teams becomes even more difficult as individuals will not be willing to use a different tool for every project they work on.
Forming a strategy that promotes collaboration, using a defined set of tools, will minimise the use of ‘shadow IT’ and encourage much greater user adoption.
4. Think beyond collaboration tools
While the tools you implement form an important part of your strategy, you also need to look at your culture and working environments.
Promoting a culture that encourages collaborative working may be something you already do, in which case it’s a matter of ‘tweaking’ it to encourage the use of your new tools. However, if this cultural shift is new, you should involve your staff throughout the process to make sure they’re aware of how the solution will change the way they work for the better.
Alongside this, it’s also key that your workspaces are kitted out to encourage collaborative working. Think about quiet areas and huddle spaces in the office, coupled with the right applications for remote and mobile workers.
Need some help deciding on a collaboration tool for your business? Let us help.
