Information Technology Navigator

When making a decision to move production workloads to the cloud, one of the first things that is considered is cost. However, there are frequently many hidden costs that are not factored into the cloud decision until they appear in the real world. For instance, what is the cost to end users’ productivity if they don’t have the correct access to the application or system that now resides in the cloud? What new burdens are placed on the IT team if end users, now managing identities in two places, constantly require assistance to access their work? What costs are associated with securely authenticating end users to the workload?

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Organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to take advantage of the many benefits the cloud has to offer.  As they begin to evaluate cloud options, they want to see how and where the cloud can fit into their business model securely and cost effectively. To address the most common concerns of moving to the cloud, security and cost, Daymark has a program that allows a business to visualize their workloads in the cloud, enabling them to see exactly how their concerns will be addressed.

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It’s no secret that technology is moving fast – really fast! And its impact on how business is conducted cannot be overstated. To better reflect how we’re helping our clients navigate all the changes in IT, we’ve given our website, www.daymarksi.com, a makeover.

It includes a clean new design, easier menu navigation, faster load times and some really beautiful images in keeping with Daymark’s nautical theme. There’s a lot of great info on: 

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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” 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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To outsource or not, that is the question – and it’s becoming a more frequent conversation among CTOs. Outsourcing an application or workload to a 3^rd party managed service or cloud provider can deliver multiple benefits, from reducing CAPEX costs to freeing IT staff to work on more strategic initiatives. But before you jump in, it’s important to make sure you are partnering with the right service provider. Here are some of the questions you should ask:

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I chuckled to myself as I drove to work this morning. An ad came on the radio talking in clichés. “Synergy!” “Run it up the flag pole.” “Better safe than sorry.” And that was enough to send me into action and write this blog post.

The clichés and metaphors surrounding the cloud are seemingly endless. You read about “The cloud journey.” “The cloudy IT forecast,” and on and on.  It’s no secret that many organizations are looking for ways to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud. Moving to the cloud can reduce capital expenditures, eliminate over provisioning, lighten employee workloads, free IT staff to work on strategic initiatives, and help businesses become more agile.

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Virtualization Changed Everything

While we may all be familiar with virtualization at this point, we are still feeling its significant impact on our data centers. What was once sprawling racks of servers has been consolidated into ever-smaller hardware packages.  With the advent of cloud computing, your hardware footprint could in fact be zero! However, despite the technology making our lives so much easier, it’s important to consider that our responsibility for these workloads remains the same.

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