A paradigm shift in the cloud space has led companies to not only recognise the value of Microsoft Azure public cloud environments, but to trust the platform in the delivery of regulatory requirements and business outcomes.
Bryan Lloyd, Technology Transformation Director at New Signature UK, welcomed the shift in perception in a conversation with CBR TV, yet admitted that challenges remain. “The way you deploy infrastructure, particularly in the Azure public cloud, is very different to the way it’s done traditionally, I think there is a skills shortage there. I also think the security and governance elements that you need to build into an Azure data centre environment is an area companies often neglect,” he said.
New Signature makes sure no areas are neglected in the transformation of infrastructure, extending on-premise and private environments into Azure for customers. However, no two customers are alike, with Bryan telling CBR TV:
“When we think about moving applications into the public cloud there is always a balance of transformation versus velocity to migrate into the cloud. When we are having a discussion with a customer we work out what their driver is to move that environment.”
Having New Signature manage the move to Azure makes room to seize upon the myriad of benefits moving to such an environment brings. Breaking the costly, inflexible shackles of on-premise or private environments allows a business to operate with agility and have the edge over rivals when it comes to opportunities and innovation. Highlighting some of the other benefits, Bryan said:
“There could be a financial benefit in moving from a traditional capital expenditure model to an operational pay-as-you-go, pay-per-minute consumption based model. You can be a lot more agile and competitive in that environment.”
Reducing the total cost of ownership is a huge benefit of moving to Azure – Backup, power, storage and management costs are reduced and handled by Azure. As costs decrease, performance increases.
Downtime and bottlenecks are diminished, increasing availability of applications and improving application performance and availability, as well as accelerating application development and testing.
Long-term, the move to Azure allows organisations to harness data, cloud and emerging technologies like AI to out perform and innovate – in short, a modern business needs a modern data centre.
