Information Technology Navigator

In my last post, "Making the Business Case for a New Disk Array," I talked about using TCO and ROI to make a decision on whether to replace or upgrade an aging disk array. Now, we’ll look at how to cost justify a new software investment.

Example:

• The Situation: A business is contemplating investing in a software management tool which will allow them to have a better understanding of their application workloads, infrastructure utilization and know where and when bottlenecks exist within the infrastructure.

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Now that we’ve talked about how how to make IT Investments for the future and how TCO and ROI differ, let’s look at a few examples and see where TCO and ROI analysis might come into play for a business.

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Today’s CIOs take an active role in helping the business be more competitive, drive revenue and innovate. When new IT investments are needed to support the business, a cost justification, either in the form of TCO or ROI is required. When should you make the case for each? When do you need both?

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Today more than ever businesses are being challenged to make sound, financially prudent investments in their IT infrastructure. CIOs are under pressure to contain spending while at the same time deliver the IT services needed to support the business’ increasing desire for applications that are more agile, perform better and are available 24x7.

It is in this context that IT decision makers must decide what infrastructure (servers, storage, networks, software) will be used to support the business’ applications. And this is not a one-shot deal.

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At Daymark, we practice what we preach. If it’s not good enough for us, it’s not good enough for our customers either! One example: Microsoft Azure. Long before we achieved Elite Microsoft partner status, we had moved our own network onto Azure, and now have over three years of experience running our environment in the cloud. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned and best practices we implement when helping clients migrate to Azure.

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Cloud technologies started becoming relevant about ten years ago, and now more and more businesses have been moving their IT environments from on-prem hardware to the cloud. With many organizations adopting a “cloud first” strategy, it is clear that we are heading into a time where it will be the norm for companies to have the majority of their IT environment in the cloud instead of on-prem.

This thought reminded me of a Winston Churchill quote, in which he said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” When Churchill said this, he was referring to World War 2, but this quote also applies to how this is the end of the beginning of the adoption of cloud technologies. Sooner rather than later, all companies’ IT environments will have some sort of integration with cloud technologies, whether their entire environment is moved to the cloud, or they run a hybrid environment.

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In “Part 1” and “Part 2” of this blog series on Microsoft Azure, I’ve covered frequently asked questions on security, migration best practices and how to get started with a pilot. Here, in this third and final installment, I share common questions on predicting costs, deployment “gotchas” and competitive offerings.

Q. How can I estimate my monthly/yearly Azure costs?

A. Azure has a pricing calculator service which allows you to add any product that you envision your cloud having, and then it will estimate your costs for you. You can see and try the calculator out for yourself by clicking here.

Q. What are the unexpected “gotchas” in a typical Azure deployment?

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In “Part 1” of this blog series we covered some of the basic Microsoft Azure questions surrounding security and backup. In this post, I dive into frequently asked questions around migration best practices and how to get started with a pilot project.

Q. How do I go about data migration to and from Azure?
 
A. The most effective way to migrate data to and from Azure is by using the Azure Import/Export service by creating “jobs” and shipping portable, encrypted disk drives to the Azure data center. Each disk that is shipped is associated with a single job, and there are different kinds of storage specific to each job. All in all, this is a very economic method of transfer.
 

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Ready to dip your toes in the public cloud waters? Many of our clients are in that situation, while others are pursuing a “cloud-first” strategy. Regardless of where you are in the cloud journey, I thought I’d share some of the key factors to consider when evaluating one of the most popular public clouds, Microsoft Azure. We see Azure helping enterprises of all sizes deliver on the agility and scalability required to support business growth, but before you jump in, here are some questions you should be asking and our answers to them:

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Reporting-as-a-Service (RaaS) is gaining momentum by providing IT organizations with the analytics and visibility they need to better understand their heterogeneous storage, unstructured data, backup, SAN fabric and virtualized environment. At Daymark, we’ve seen a big uptick in interest in RaaS, but like any relatively new managed services offering, there are questions. Here are some of the ones we get asked the most.

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