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.
We’ve never met a CEO who enjoys the CIO telling them “No – we can’t do that!”
So – what are the potential issues with on-site infrastructure?
- There is a physical storage or compute constraint
- There are delays and costs involved in removing this constraint
- Any unresolved constraint has a demonstrable, negative impact on the business
- Generally technology is supported by the vendor for 3 years – upgrading re-starts the process of expenditure, impending limitations etc.
Embracing a new paradigm
The public cloud – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform – should be considered:
- There are no boundaries – new systems can be “spun up” as required
- Access to additional infrastructure is instant
- Ongoing on-premise hardware upgrades, maintenance costs etc disappear
- Cloud does a lot more than “host servers” including the following to name just a few:
- Backups – reduce the necessity for tape/disk-based backup, and reduce the cost of long term off-site storage
- Archive – move old, infrequently used data to inexpensive yet readily accessible off-site locations
- Platform as a Service – use cloud to reduce the space required to implement operating systems – providing more provisioning, and hence more business agility.
The 5 key questions for you to consider
- Which – if any – public cloud(s) should my organisation embrace?
- Which workloads, storage elements etc should we move to the cloud?
- What’s the best transition plan? How do we get there?
- How do we ensure appropriate governance, security etc?
- How do we get the best value?
Next steps
To find the answers to the above – and any other questions – go to our infrastructure storage assessment page and answer a few brief questions and we will contact you to assist you identify your options.