Around the globe, working remotely is becoming standard. With large offices potentially set to become a thing of the past, learn how Northdoor Managed Services can help your business gain the flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency of cloud computing with minimal business risk.
Adapting to flexible working
Working from home is becoming more and more common. Even though the direction of travel is clear, the wider impact of this change is less certain. As a result, many businesses are now considering how remote working will shape their requirements in a wide range of domains, including IT.
Just as sourcing a desk for every employee in the company may no longer be a consideration when selecting an office space, a growing number of businesses will ask whether it still makes sense to manage, power and cool a data centre or server room on-premises. Over the last decade, leading cloud vendors have demonstrated their ability to deliver levels of availability, security, flexibility—and above all, cost-efficiency—that outclass most on-premises environments. Companies are also considering how best to use their in-house IT personnel: why tie up valued team members in low-level administration and fire-fighting if they are better employed on value-add activities?
Cloud adoption takes off
Data is the fuel that powers global business, and an estimated 90 percent of all the data that exists today was created within the last two years alone. Migrating to the cloud is an effective way to solve the challenges associated with rapidly growing data volumes, to reduce the cost of long-term data retention, and to ensure that important information will be available to the teams that need it 24/7.
Organisations are continuing to embrace hybrid-cloud architectures that enable sensitive data to remain inside the firewall while ensuring developers are still free to experiment with innovative, data-driven services. At the same time, they are looking to managed services providers to take away some of the low-level strain, freeing IT administrators to better support business users—especially valuable in an age of remote working—and change-management projects.
Is a fully managed Cloud service right for you?
To maximise the benefits of cloud and reduce risk during your cloud migration, it’s important to consider all the technologies in your IT environment. As well as determining which of these technologies can be lifted and shifted to the cloud with minimal configuration or architectural changes, the aim is to identify opportunities to reduce the ongoing management and maintenance requirements for the new cloud environment. If key components of your infrastructure require a small number of hours to maintain each month, it may make sense to select a fully managed service to deliver them.
A managed service solution is a particularly good fit for technologies that typically require little to no weekly maintenance. For all but the world’s largest businesses, retaining employees with the necessary skills to support every critical component in the stack is simply not economically viable. By choosing a managed service from a proven cloud vendor, you can ensure that you have support resources on tap 24/7 to remediate any issues that might come along—without sending your operational costs soaring.
Selecting a proven partner for your managed cloud service provider
Your choice of IT service management vendor is just as important as your choice of cloud platform. Before you move mission-critical systems to a managed service in the cloud, it’s crucial to confirm that your vendor has the in-house skills and technical capabilities to deliver on your service-level requirements.
For more than 30 years, Northdoor has provided expert IT services that help businesses keep their information systems online 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With deep expertise that spans every part of the IT stack—from operating systems and databases to cloud systems and web servers—Northdoor Managed Services come with rigorous service-level agreements, an ITIL-compliant service desk, and on-site support to get you back on your feet fast in a recovery scenario. We are also recognised experts in high-performance IBM flash and hybrid storage solutions in the cloud.
Throughout the ongoing crisis, Northdoor has helped clients by handling day-to-day administration of systems and storage, releasing their in-house staff to focus on serving business users in the transition to new ways of working.
If your business is considering a move to cloud, or if you’re struggling to manage IT administration while also enabling the shift to remote working, Northdoor can help. To connect with a Northdoor expert today, contact us today or visit our page on managed services