Cloud

In two of my previous posts I discussed people and platform. In this post I’m going to share six steps to help your organization get started with platform as a service (PaaS). As with any new solution, it’s important to map out the implementation strategy. Whether your using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS, or serverless, an enterprise architect along with your cloud center of excellence provides “recommended practices.” Agree or disagree, a decoupled component design provides flexibility with scale, maintainability, support and empowers faster change while remaining stable.

At this point you might be thinking, “Is it that easy?” Not really. Like any project, planning is required. The plan should be iterative with 2-3 outcomes and with 2-6 team members. First, identify yourself: are you application development or the IT operations infrastructure persona? For example, consider this blog post that describes Microservices: Change is here today and is impacting our processes. Traditionally, these two personas do not know each other, but they should not be afraid of each other. Get to know them, and working together might look something like this:

In 2020, we’ve seen to what happens when companies roll out cloud collaboration solutions in a hurry. Forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to support remote work in new ways, many organizations struggled to deploy tools that met their performance needs, complied with their data safety regulations or even addressed their employees’ most common use cases.

With the lessons of 2020 still fresh, now is a great time for IT and business leaders to build an implementation roadmap for tools such as Microsoft Office 365. Here are seven steps they should consider along the way.

Cloud governance is a framework that guides how end users make use of cloud services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment. It’s imperative to have good cloud governance because it’s a foundational element to your cloud practice that provides the ability to scale and be successful.

Migrating to the cloud is an exciting journey as it provides greater flexibility to the IT teams for creating resources and provisioning them. Gone are the days when it used to take weeks and months to request resources and additional provisioning from the infrastructure teams. Cloud vendors now provide the capabilities to create resources such as compute instances plus add-on software, databases, firewall groups, storage, etc. via APIs.

The cloud-provided capabilities are very powerful and can potentially bring many inconsistencies and resource ownership issues into the environment.

Many organizations are shifting their contact centers to the cloud, often as a way to take advantage of the superior security, reliability, flexibility, location independence and real-time updates offered by Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions.

However, as often happens with new technology rollouts, too many companies are skimping on training programs for their employees and managers that can aid in the effective use of the new systems. This oversight is highly likely to create difficulties down the road.

Effective training programs are important not only to smooth the rollout of a CCaaS solution, but also to ensure that companies are positioned to unlock all of the value from their new tools. Without effective training, a cloud contact center can create confusion among agents and managers and leave company leaders in the dark about some of their most important customer data.

Almost every customer that we talk to wants a disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Many organizations will push their backup and recovery solutions to the brink but never really achieve the ability to run applications in production in the event of a disaster. This is likely because of cost and complexity.

Traditional colocation facilities or secondary data center locations in an active-active setup tend to have high costs by way of traditional data center expenses. Why build two data centers when you only need one?

Using traditional independent software vendor (ISV) solutions coupled with a handful of native cloud tools can keep costs low. But this arrangement requires cloud skillsets that most customers do not have in-house. For many customers, this means their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is at risk.

In recent months, organizations across industries have been forced to adopt new approaches throughout their entire operations. Barbers started giving outdoor haircuts and accepting contactless payments. Schools have equipped their students and instructors with laptops, sent them home and invented new methods of teaching and learning on the fly. Sports teams have even played in empty stadiums, with professional basketball players enclosing themselves in a “bubble” for a COVID-free playoff tournament.

The pressures of the coronavirus pandemic have also led to changes in many data centers. This new business environment has forced companies to embrace modernization, especially those that may have previously lagged behind on needed changes.

Here are four ways that I’m seeing savvy IT and business leaders improve their data center infrastructure and operations through digital transformation.