COVID-19 + Cloud Readiness: Scaling a Remote Workforce
When COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, organizations instantly realized: (1) employees would have to go home to work, (2) students would have to go home to learn, and (3) patients would have to stay home to protect themselves and others. Many were caught off guard.
COVID-19 has shown us that secure cloud architectures are no longer nice-to-haves, they’re must-haves for virtually everyone—from enterprises and governments to small businesses, schools, and hospitals. Though concerns about public cloud still linger, in COVID-19’s wake, cloud services have proven they are ready to handle the demands to support the enterprise—be they security, availability, scale, cost aligned to use, agility, and others.
In truth, the considerable risks and costs spawned by complex legacy infrastructures don’t even compare to the cloud services offered by heavyweights AWS and Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft has reported a significant increase in demand for its Azure cloud services due to the pandemic—with no significant service disruptions—while expediting the addition of new capacity. How many organizations can make similar claims?
“Without scalable cloud services,” according to Syracuse University researchers, “the current disaster would be unimaginably worse.”
If another pandemic or other major business disruption strikes (and it will), is your organization prepared to stand up the desktops that employees need to work from home…over a weekend?
Ensure your organization is cloud ready
In times like these, transitioning the right workloads to the cloud in the right way—and right away—is business critical.
But doing this with complex architectures, shrinking resources, and security vulnerabilities, while keeping pace with newer technologies like AI and machine learning, is challenging.
It requires a design framework based on best practices with built-in security and compliance, appropriate policies and governance for resilient and reliable performance, high availability to ensure business continuity, and easy management across the environment. Most importantly, it must enable the desired outcomes.
One option is to do it yourself. While you’ll save on costs, most organizations are already short on resources, time, and necessary skills, particularly security skills which are in short supply globally. Another much more expensive option is to hire the resources and expertise you need from a third party.
But there’s an easier way at a fraction of the cost: a pre-configured cloud environment.
Logicalis: Your expert production-ready cloud partner
As a global Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, Logicalis offers a pre-packaged, pre-configured cloud environment designed to get you from zero to production in weeks.
The Logicalis Production-Ready Cloud Platform gives IT teams the “foundations and guardrails” needed to deploy future, additional workloads to Azure, rapidly and with the full confidence that it will deliver the right outcome. In fact, we recently stood up 15,000 desktops for one of our customers—over a weekend.
Plus, Logicalis offers supportive assessments and services to get you ready to leverage the Logicalis Production-Ready Cloud Platform, regardless of where you are in your cloud journey. We bring vast cloud and security experience to help you reduce operating costs, agilely deliver services to stakeholders, and provide recommendations on next steps.
Global nonprofit: A case study
After going through our process, a global nonprofit now spends less on IT infrastructure and more on directly impacting children, enabling them to preserve their highly favorable ratings among charity watchdogs and other accreditation sites. As a result, they:
- Are on track to realize a projected cost-savings of 49 percent.
- Can focus on their core IT strengths, such as ServiceDesk and CRM, rather than managing disparate systems.
- Have enabled employees with a single identity to access the applications they need from the organization’s more than 3,000 cloud-based apps.
Download the Logicalis Production-Ready Cloud Platform datasheet to learn more. Or find more information about Logicalis cloud solutions here.
Tony Fischer is Director of Business Development for Logicalis US, responsible for Cloud and Service Management.