Unlimited Availability. The complete trusted cloud for business. Moving to Microsoft Azure is the stepping stone to unlocking new ways of working. Ensure your journey to the cloud is defined and controlled to get the most from your investment
Contact UsMoving your organisation to Azure, or to any other public cloud platform can feel like a difficult journey. You know the destination, but you can never truly predict the challenges along the way. You can discuss the project from a high level, where you’re hoping to end up – but where you will reach may be different if you don’t maintain focus on where you set out to go in the first place.
This is why many people rely on a guide, or a risual consultant who has travelled the road before, to help find the easiest route, and remind you of the bigger picture to keep you on track. The services within Azure are so broad and varied, we can advise on the best approach and the right Azure services to help your business reach its destination. Whether you are just starting out and looking to move your infrastructure into the cloud; or if you are already a cloud-first business looking to capitalise on the bleeding edge of services available in Azure we can help.
Moving your infrastructure to the cloud, is often the first step in the journey to becoming an agile, modern business. Although it makes the little visible impact to the end users having a well architected, robust infrastructure that can grow with an organisations needs is imperative to keeping ahead of competitors and IT becoming a business change leader in your organisation.
We have worked with many organisations, who are deadline driven and want to ‘achieve transformation’ by a specific date – we can work to deadlines, but work with the customer to revise their view of ‘transformation’. You will not have transformed by simply being in the cloud, if you ‘lift and shift’ your infrastructure, you will be the same IT estate, just hosted somewhere else. To achieve cost savings and business benefits, we offer multiple packaged service to optimize your infrastructure and Azure subscriptions. Our business analysts and architects work to understand what the long term goals are for your Azure journey, and build an IaaS offering in Azure that will enable you to achieve this in a way that is cost effective and organised.
Whilst there are cost savings to be had from moving to the cloud, true value comes from a journey through the cloud and using it as a platform to build, test and deploy new solutions to keep up with developing markets.
A lot of organisations are currently experimenting with Azure, and may have moved a few services to the cloud, and a few on premise. Others have completely ‘lifted and shifted’ their estate to the cloud, and are now sitting waiting to see the results of this move. In actuality, if you simply pick up your current estate, and just move the same thing into the cloud it will not add much value to your organisation or save much money.
You need to view Azure as the hub your IT is built around, you can use hybrid functionality to connect to on-premise servers, but the move to the cloud is all about enabling you to focus on building for the future, rather than ‘keeping the lights on’.
Software as a service (SaaS) allows users to connect to and use cloud-based apps over the Internet. Common examples are email, calendaring and office tools (such as Microsoft Office 365).
SaaS enables organisations to purchase software on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider. You rent the use of an app for your organisation, and your users connect to it over the Internet, usually with a web browser. All of the underlying infrastructure, middleware, app software and app data are located in the service provider’s data centre.
The service provider manages the hardware and software, and with the appropriate service agreement, will ensure the availability and the security of the app and your data as well. SaaS allows your organisation to get up and running quickly with an app, at minimal upfront cost.
Using the cloud for your infrastructure enables you to quickly spin up, test and deploy productivity apps, such as email, collaboration and calendaring apps; and sophisticated business applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and document management applications. You pay for the use of these apps by subscription or according to the level of use.
