Our client Steve Hodgkinson, CIO at Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services, has been writing a lot about the “Platform+Agile” approach they have taken with the department.

With this approach, the organisation makes a strategic choice about a preferred platform (eg Azure), and then uses that platform in an agile, iterative manner – avoiding the need for transactional procurement for new business systems wherever possible.

This approach significantly enhances the productivity of the application development process. Starting with a platform encourages the re-use of modules and focuses in-house skills on “what is known”.

Steve has written many articles on this topic and presented at many conferences.

To help spread the word, we’ve put together a white paper summarising the approach, why it’s needed, and the benefits that can be achieved.

 

There’s no excuse – if you’re having space constraints, you’re actually constraining the agility of the business your IT department serves!

Today businesses need to address problems and opportunities quickly. With a focus on business intelligence, IoT, big data, etc – IT is critical to business success – particularly in public service organisations.

On-premise systems by definition have capacity limits, in compute or storage. Once at capacity, no additional systems or workloads can be provisioned. Business agility is reduced. Continue reading →

Last year we published quite a few articles about moving to the cloud.

These covered everything from the questions you need to ask yourself first, through to successful strategies, and more.

We’ve put together a list of the top 3 blog articles by popularity, in case you missed any when they were published. Here are our top 3 blogs from 2017…

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There is little doubt that the cloud has fundamentally changed the way that modern business operates. As more and more organisations adopt cloud computing, a leading analyst firm is reporting that “by 2020, a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today”.

The cloud has also altered the way organisations view and value their IT. The ability to sign up online and start consuming services instantly is now a given. This has changed the expectation on how long it should take before IT starts delivering value. This need for a faster turnaround on value has inspired many IT departments to embrace the agility and flexibility of the cloud, or risk being left behind.

Here are 3 key ways the cloud delivers value fast.
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With high numbers of cyber attacks affecting businesses every day, a disaster response plan is imperative for every organisation. Would you believe there are still many companies, including publicly listed ones, that don’t have an adequate business continuity plan in place?

It’s no wonder given the complexity, high cost and lack of flexibility of traditional disaster response solutions. The good news is that the cloud now offers a better way to bounce back after a catastrophic event. Azure Site Recovery offers a simple, flexible and affordable approach to disaster response and business continuity. Here’s why. Continue reading →

One of the key reasons organisations are moving to the cloud is to take advantage of the flexible payment model. Your upfront fees are replaced by a “pay only for what you use” model giving you greater control over your spending. However, this level of freedom means you need to closely manage your cloud usage. With a strategy that includes adequate reporting tools, you can experience significant savings, but if you don’t have complete visibility, you’ll likely end up with unnecessary costs.

When you have the right set-up, Azure includes all the tools you need to track and effectively manage your cloud usage and spending. Here is a cheat sheet on how to position yourself with the right reporting tools in Azure, to get the most value from the cloud. Continue reading →

When you move to the cloud there’s a huge opportunity to reduce your IT costs and get more for your money. The usage-based pricing model of the cloud offers complete flexibility and control over your spending, which is one of the biggest drawcards for businesses considering migrating.

With a little forward planning, the cloud brings significant cost savings – but skip this important step and you’ll likely blow your budget fast. So, to avoid unnecessary bill shock, make sure you start with a clear and informed cloud strategy that sets out not only your goals, but also how you’ll manage your costs.

Here are three key ways to optimise your costs and get maximum value from the cloud. Continue reading →

After working with many customers over the last 6-7 years with cloud migrations, we’ve seen what makes a successful migration strategy, and more importantly some common traits in the migrations that aren’t so successful.

A key consideration for cloud migration is the business expectation – cloud brings an expectation of agility, flexibility and rapid evolution. Any strategy that spends a long time going through design or validation before turning on any features is viewed poorly by the business, and as a result undermines the trust that IT has in that organisation.

We see two main strategies that drive a successful cloud migration:

1. A new workload being deployed to the cloud
2. A datacentre migration to reduce complexity or costs.

The third, and most common strategy we see for cloud migration, is to review all workloads and transform them into the cloud. This strategy tends to lose steam and stall, and the business perception is a long running, poorly delivering IT project.

This article explores the differences and how to ensure success for your strategy to the cloud. Continue reading →