Over the years, IT has become more and more complex to implement and manage. The demand for successful IT in the workplace has become a top priority for CEOs to be able to run a competitive business. Companies now bring in specialized IT Consultants to help manage complex systems, they employ CIOs, CTOs & Chief Technologists to try and drive decisions from the board level. IT is now a critical part of every business, and therefore needs to be managed appropriately, while being as simple to implement and manage as possible.
In this post, we are going to discuss how moving to the cloud can help you reduce the complexities of your IT environment.
1. Everything is Visible
When you move to the cloud, everything is visible. By using the Microsoft Azure or Nerdio portal, you can literally see everything or run reports showing us what is deployed and available. If we move 100% to the cloud, we have complete visibility of our IT Infrastructure from a single pane of glass. We can view our servers, desktops, networks, storage, and much more. If we use features like resource tagging, we can easily run reports showing IT usage on a department-by-department basis, or geographic location, giving us a complete overview of our environment.
2. Security
Security is one of the top priorities on every CIO’s mind today. Ransomware attacks seem to be a common weekly occurrence with companies paying out hundreds of millions of pounds in ransomware demands. If you manage a complex IT environment, then the likelihood of having security holes in your infrastructure increase. These can include unpatched servers, out of date firmware, simple user passwords, etc. When moving to the cloud, most of these things are easier to control and update. Microsoft invests a lot of money in security, and by migrating to the cloud and taking advantage of the PaaS services, it involves less security complexities for you to manage.
3. Mobile Workforces
During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have been forced to move the cloud at pace to enable their workforces to carry on with their day-to-day duties. Companies quickly discovered that sourcing, deploying, and managing physical desktops can be time consuming, complex, and difficult. Moving your mobile workforce to the cloud helps keep that simple. Instead of taking weeks so source, build and deploy physical desktops, we can build and deploy tens of thousands of desktops within days. Once the desktops are deployed, they become even simpler to manage as we have complete visibility and control of them.
4. Desktop Image Management
Managing Desktop Images can be immensely complex. Companies sometimes have multiple desktop images to manage with hundreds of applications and versions to keep track of. Using Cloud technologies, we can automate and centralise the desktop management process, enabling us to reduce the number of desktop images required and ensure that the application versions are consistent. Image deployment can go down from weeks to days – and even hours in some instances.
5. Identity/Authentication
Identity in 2021 is difficult to manage. Your end users must authenticate against multiple systems using different passwords and login identities. There have been many advancements over the years with this, but most of these features are only available to companies who have migrated to the cloud. If you adopt O365, MFA Authentication, Conditional Access, password-less logins,etc., it can make your identity and authentication much simpler going forward into the future.
6. Vendor Management
In your average on-premises IT infrastructure, there are multiple vendors involved. We have Vendor A who supplies your servers, Vendor B who supplies your storage, Vendor C who provides your backups, Vendor D who manages your anti-virus. All these vendors need managing with license renewals, warranties, support calls, etc. If you migrate to the cloud, most of those complexities go away. The same vendor is now able to manage all your compute, storage, networking, backups, antivirus, etc.
7. Real Estate
If you run your own datacentre either as an MSP Business or a corporate organization, it can be complicated, expensive, and complex. We always must think about availability, security, cooling, power, being paged at 2:00 in the morning to reboot a server, etc. If we move all our resources to the cloud, this is not our problem anymore; somebody else manages all of this for us. Therefore, we have reduced the complexity of what we need to manage.
8. Cost Control and Reporting
Managing cost in an on-prem world can be complex and difficult. There is the complexity of managing hardware upgrades, storage, network switches, etc. Project spend can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions. When you migrate to the cloud, the costs can be much lower and simpler because you are effectively just paying for what you use. By using the tagging, billing, and subscription features, we can enable different departments within the business to manage and plan their own costs, making it simpler for everyone.
9. Get Rid of Your Legacy
Most IT deployments have what we call “technical debt”. This is normally legacy code or applications that nobody knows anything about, so it never gets upgraded and is left behind. When we migrate to the cloud, it forces us to either get rid of anything that is legacy and migrate it to either another service, or to a PaaS instance. Again, this reduces the complexity of your IT environment as there is no technical debt.
10. Upgrades are a Thing of the Past
Keeping your applications up to date for licensing, compliance, and security reasons can be a very complex problem. With some environments containing hundreds of applications, it can be a single person’s job just to manage this. If we manage to convert our applications to PaaS instances, it is now up to the vendor to keep these application backends up to date.
Summary
So, there you have it; 10 ways to reduce complexity in your IT environment by moving to the cloud! There are many more benefits of moving your workload to the cloud. If you want to know more, then please get in touch with us at Nerdio and we can help you migrate your workload into Azure.
Want to see for yourself how Nerdio can reduce IT complexity for your organization?
