In November, Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of VMware raised eyebrows. In January, the announcement that 56 of VMware’s products and services would be axed raised alarm bells.

As part of a wider strategic shift away from end-user computing, which includes a move from component sales to subscription-based bundles, VMware will no longer offer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) under Broadcom’s ownership. Thousands of organisations are set to be impacted by the termination of products such as VMware Horizon, which will reach end-of-life in January 2025.

The clock is ticking…

The countdown is on, and organisations have little choice but to act swiftly and smartly. Failure to do so will leave your business running on outdated, unsupported software platforms, posing enormous security risks yourself, your users and your customers.

Inaction could also see you lose any competitive or operational advantages you may have on others in your market. Business change takes time. Waiting until January 2025 to think you can quickly migrate your VDI is a surefire way to bring your business to its knees – your business continuity will be hampered, your performance will falter, and your reputation will be damaged.

To successfully transition from VMware Horizon to another VDI product, you have to start the ball rolling sooner rather than later.

What now?

As a Microsoft specialist and an Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, it won’t surprise you to hear us telling you that Azure Virtual Desktop is the logical replacement for VMware Horizon. But those are claims are not rooted in bias – we’ve got plenty of evidence to support them.

In Gartner’s most recent magic quadrant report assessing the Desktop-as-a-Service market, there was clear daylight between market-leading Microsoft its competitors, with Citrix and the ill-fated VMware the only other providers to place in the top-right quadrant.

What’s more is the simplicity of migrating your infrastructure to AVD, which makes integrating your existing VDI image into its new platform straightforward. The tools and processes that you are used to in Horizon all have adequate and, in most cases, improved replacements in AVD.

Your VMWare Horizon Connection Server will become the AVD Management Plane, for example, which facilitates the management, deployment and brokering of virtual desktops and applications. You’ll swap Horizon Composer for Image Management, which allows you to create custom images with the necessary configurations and applications as opposed to managing linked, cloned images. Instant Clones makes way for AVD Scaling, which enables you to dynamically adjust your number of virtual machines on demand, reducing or increasing them whenever you need to.

AVD will also allow your organisation to focus almost solely on Operational Expenditure, rather than having to balance it alongside Capital Expenditure. Not only is Microsoft’s offering much more cost effective, with its flexible pricing model allowing you to scale your VDI estate up and down as required, it can also be packaged within your existing Microsoft 365 Enterprise licenses. No server costs, no additional licensing, just an initial piece of hardware for the user, an internet connection, and an M365 license.

What are you waiting for?

The use cases of a cloud-based VDI like Microsoft Azure form an almost endless list. From hosting legacy applications and supporting temporary workloads, to remote work enablement, Bring Your Own Device support and disaster recovery functionality, AVD provides the tools your business needs to maintain, and grow, its competitive and operational advantages. With the clock counting down to January 2025, action must be taken now to ensure that business continuity is not impacted.

The news surrounding VMware Horizon has created stormy seas for businesses to try and navigate, but AVD can provide the safety of the shore on which you can build your new-and-improved virtual desktop infrastructure.

If you need a helping hand, think of Cloud Direct as your lighthouse. We’ll show you the way to a better, brighter business future in Microsoft Azure, and our experts can help make for a smooth, seamless transition.

 

To find out more about migrating from VMware Horizon to Azure Virtual Desktop, join Cloud Direct’s Principal Cloud Evangelist, Leon Godwin, in our free webinar on Thursday 29^th February. Click the link or the image to sign up.

 

 

In November, Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of VMWare raised eyebrows. In January, the announcement that 56 of VMWare’s products and services would be axed raised alarm bells. That long list of offerings included VMWare Horizon, a popular product among many law firms that will now no longer be available to provide them with virtual desktop infrastructure.

Law firms must act now to avoid being caught short when Horizon is terminated in January 2025. The logical solution is undergoing a migration to Microsoft Azure, which many organisations turned to as the call for remote work gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic. This provided them access to Azure Virtual Desktop, giving lawyers the opportunity to embrace a hybrid working model.

However, a survey by The Law Society Gazette found that only 17 per cent of in-house lawyers work under a hybrid model,  and there is a continued appetite amongst in-house lawyers in the UK to be able to work from home. A Microsoft Azure migration, and subsequently Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), is the stone to take care of both birds.

AVD is suitable for law firms of all sizes, and comes with a wide range of benefits from better cost efficiencies and improved collaboration, to greater agility and increased data security amongst many others. Let’s explore them each in a bit more detail.

Data security

Transferring your law firm’s data into Azure Virtual Desktop eliminates the potential risks associated with hardware tampering, loss, or theft.

AVD is built on the same security framework as Microsoft Azure, ensuring that you can fully leverage the advantages of identity management, backup, database security and more.

It’s important to highlight that Microsoft commits more than $1 billion each year to reinforce its security measures, supported by a team of over 3,500 security experts that are dedicated to enhancing your law firm’s security. Azure has more compliance certifications than any over cloud service provider, meaning you have access to the latest and greatest security tools available.

Access from anywhere

Enhanced collaboration, productivity and flexibility are among the most requested job factors from lawyers.

The challenge of allowing employees to work from any device is now a thing of the past. With AVD, employees can work from anywhere – whether that’s at a café, office, or home – because they can power up and log in to their desktop, gaining access to crucial business applications regardless of the device, as long as there’s an internet connection.

AVD empowers you to select the ideal Azure Virtual Machine (VM) that aligns with your firm’s requirements and to take advantage of Windows 11 multi-session, an exclusive feature in Azure. This capability allows you to efficiently run multiple concurrent interactive user sessions within the same deployment for increased cost-effectiveness.

Improved business resilience

If there’s one takeaway from the recent global pandemic, it’s that the future can be difficult to predict. Should the business landscape change so drastically again, AVD will enable business continuity. Law firm employees will be able to connect remotely and securely access data as everything will be available on the VM in the cloud.

Lower hardware costs

Virtual Desktops can slash expenses from the get-go with minimal costs, if the server is already up and running. You can also forget about any expensive hardware that requires specific software and licences, but it doesn’t stop there. There’s additional savings to be made later down the line too, when you’ll be able to streamline any upgrades, reducing the time IT spend repeating the same upgrade across different devices. Plus, you’ll have the ability to use existing Windows and Microsoft 365 licences to access AVD.

With the money saved from implementing AVD, your business will be able to reinvest in improving business operations and your future IT strategy.

Streamlined user administration

Administration becomes more efficient and time effective with AVD when introducing new software or allocating laptops to new employees. All tasks are conveniently managed through a unified administrative console.

With AVD, handling employee departures also becomes more efficient – their account is deleted following the transfer of data to another user, and the same physical machine can then be assigned to any new employee, delivering access to a virtual desktop pre-set with the correct apps and access rights.

Simpler licensing model

The licensing process for cloud-based desktop used to a challenge, needing at least three different types of licences, but AVD has simplified this process significantly. Now, you’ll just require a single license for each virtual machine, and if you’re already part of the Microsoft 365 subscription, chances are you’re covered. This not only simplifies the licensing process but also brings down costs.

Scaling up and down has never been easier

AVD’s cost savings go beyond licensing, offering the ability to scale your infrastructure rapidly based on business needs. This ensures efficiency not only in resource utilisation but also in cost management. The centralised AVD portal facilitates tasks like configuring networks, deploying desktops, and fortifying security for employees, all achievable with just a few clicks. A solution that’s simpler, safer, and cheaper – can you see where this is going?

The advantages of adopting Azure Virtual Desktop are countless. Implementation of AVD offers you the flexibility that is essential for continuing to grow your business and set yourself apart from your competitors. Ready to dive in? Get in contact with our experts to discover more about the power of Azure Virtual Desktop.

In an era marked by technological advancement, AI has emerged as a powerful tool that takes us beyond our everyday ways of working. Quite often when we think of AI, its associated with big-budget corporations that are throwing enormous resources into innovation and improved efficiencies.

But the impact of AI has been making waves elsewhere – and for good reason.

In the nonprofit sector, which is often tasked with making the biggest impact with limited resources, AI is quickly gaining momentum as a force for good, and is starting to play a pivotal role in helping nonprofits achieve their mission and address pressing global challenges.

AI for Optimisation and Efficiency

One of the first things you might think about when it comes to AI is ‘how can I use it in my job role to make it easier’. There’s no harm in thinking about how AI can make your job easier,  but it’s also important to look at the bigger picture for your nonprofit, and consider how it can be used to streamline processes and make them more efficient – so there’s more time for everyone to focus on the mission.

There are a few different ways in which AI can help optimise your processes:

• AI-driven chatbots can help with internal queries, routine questions and support requests, which will free up teams to focus on more strategic tasks that align with their mission.
• Internal time-consuming and repetitive tasks can be moved into automated workflows with AI – so the team have more time to focus on more impactful tasks.
• Automated expense tracking and budgeting processes will allow your finance team to analyse spending patterns, identify cost-savings, and better adhere to budgets.
• Using AI to analyse document content will make it easier for your team to find relevant information quickly.
• For your volunteer teams, AI can be used to analyse their schedules to automatically coordinate internal meetings and their volunteer activities.

…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

AI in Data Analytics and Insights

As a nonprofit, your data can be your biggest asset. Knowing how to leverage this data with AI is essential to ensuring that you can evaluate the great work that you are doing in your communities – and do more of it. From improved decision-making to impact measurement and donor engagement, your data’s power is far-reaching.

By using AI for data analytics and insights, you can…

• Track progress data on your programs, so that you can monitor their performance and outcomes to adjust the programs for better results.
• Assess historical data and identify areas where resources are most needed, ensuring sufficient use of your funds and volunteers.
• Forecast future needs in their communities with predictive analytics, helping in proactive decision-making and resource allocation.
• Assess the societal impact of nonprofit initiatives by measuring efforts and outcomes to ensure continued success in their programs.

Using AI-driven data analytics is a robust way for nonprofits to reinforce the good work that they are doing, and to continue making a positive impact on the communities they serve. By better understanding where your team’s time is making the biggest difference, what services are under-resourced or which sections of your community aren’t being served adequately, you will only become a better, more impactful, nonprofit.

AI in Fundraising and Donor Engagement

Nonprofits rely on donors to ensure that they have the funds to continue the great work that they are doing – but now, more than ever before, funds are limited. Nonprofits need to find ways of using technology to enhance their donor stewardship.

There are plenty of ways in which AI can help with donor engagement and fundraising:

• AI enables nonprofits to analyse donor behaviour, preferences and giving patterns. With this information, organisations can optimise fundraising strategies, improve donor engagement, and enhance the overall donor experience.
• Nonprofits can use AI and data tools to identify specific target donor groups and create more tailored services and communications, such as personalised thank you messages and acknowledgements.
• In combination with technologies like blockchain, AI can allow for transparent and secure donation transactions which ensure that donors can track how their contributions are being used and reinforces trust in the fundraising process.
• AI can be employed to analyse your data and create dynamic pricing models. By analysing historical data and donor behaviour, AI can suggest personalised donor amounts, increasing the likelihood of your donor commitments.

Improvements in donor stewardship are quite often top of the list of areas that nonprofits want to focus on. AI, used in the right way, can be instrumental in ensuring that nonprofits have an effective donor stewardship program – one that is not only more efficient, but also drives greater levels of donation.

Ethical Considerations for Responsible AI Adoption

The ethical considerations surrounding AI in this sector differ significantly from those in the for-profit space. Stakeholders have different motivations in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors and while both face common challenges, the former operates within a unique landscape that requires some extra consideration.

• AI systems are only as fair as the data they use. Nonprofits should ensure that their data is inclusive and representative to avoid bias, inequality, and discrimination.
• As many nonprofits will be dealing with sensitive personal data from their communities, it’s critical that data protection controls are documented and followed meticulously. They must also ensure that they are operating in a safe, secure and enclosed environment that does not share their data with third-party platforms.
• AI is fast-changing, and nonprofits should ensure that they are staying informed with the evolving regulatory landscape. Have conversations with experts, attend events and communicate changes internally to help you stay compliant.
• Address the common fears that AI and automation can replace jobs by offering staff upskilling and retraining opportunities, as well as being clear and forthcoming in your internal communications concerning the changes.

There are a multitude of ways in which nonprofits can start to use AI technology as a force for good – from optimising processes by tapping into data analytics and insights,  to enhancing fundraising drives and donor engagement levels. The possibilities are endless with data and AI tools, and they aren’t reserved for those big-budget corporations. These opportunities are well within reach for your nonprofit, and we can help you on your way.

Are you ready to start adopting AI for your nonprofit?

At Cloud Direct, we understand that using data and AI can be crucial to the success of your nonprofit’s mission. As a leading UK Microsoft Solutions Partner and Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, we can assist you in your digital transformation journey and provide access to Microsoft nonprofit resources and funding.

From Azure migration to building a sound data strategy and implementing key Microsoft AI services such as OpenAI, Copilot, Power BI and more, our experts can help kickstart your data and AI journey in the cloud. Get in touch today to find out more, or book a free 1:1 Data and AI Innovation Workshop for a tailored assessment of your AI potential.

Many industries fall under the retail umbrella, from consumer goods and manufacturing to travel and tourism and automotive, but they all have something in common – wanting to provide a seamless customer experience. With stiff competition across all sectors, the customer experience you provide stands out as a crucial differentiator for success.

As technology continues to shape the industry, retail businesses find themselves at a crossroads of delivering high-end customer satisfaction while adopting new and innovative technologies. Those retailers that embrace the power of data and AI in their digital transformation journeys are discovering new ways to elevate their customer experiences.

There are a whole host of reasons as to why you should start leveraging your data and the capabilities of artificial intelligence to revolutionise the way you engage with customers. We’ve picked out five key considerations.

Customer Personalisation

Data and AI can play a crucial role in helping retailers to personalise their offerings and enhance the overall customer experience. By analysing customer data, including past purchases, preferences, and online behaviours, retailers can tailor recommendations and promotions to individual shoppers. With AI, algorithms can use this data to suggest relevant products to customers which can increase the likelihood of cross-selling or upselling.

With the same data, personalised loyalty programmes can be created. You can analyse customer behaviour to offer personal rewards, discounts, or incentives to customers based on their preferences and habits. By leveraging AI and data, you can start to rise above the competition by creating personalised and targeted experiences, which leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and improved business outcomes.

Inventory Management

To maintain a positive customer experience, a retailer needs to ensure that its inventory and offerings are well-managed and meet customer demand. The data you have, combined with artificial intelligence, can help ensure sure you always meet these demands. For an online fashion retailer, for example, an automated platform could analyse historical sales data, seasonality patterns and shopping trends to accurately forecast demand. This can help prevent low stock and also reduce excess inventory, minimising waste and improving efficiency.

Another example would be supply chain optimisation.  Wholesalers can use real-time data, customer demand patterns and inventory levels to help to optimise their supply chains by identifying any issues, predicting delivery times, and streamlining logistics. This ensures wholesale inventory is on time and always in stock.

Omnichannel Experience

Most consumers come to expect a consistent experience across the various channels of interaction within a retailer. With AI, you can start to create a pivotal omnichannel experience for their customers. By using data from different touchpoints, retailers can start to gain a comprehensive understanding of the journey that a customer takes, which allows them to then provide consistent and personalised interactions across the various channels – offering targeted promotions in an email based on their in-store sales history, for example.

By leveraging AI and data, retailers can break down the silos between different channels and start to deliver an improved and more personalised omnichannel customer experience, with a journey that meets customer expectations and promotes brand loyalty.

Cybersecurity

Retail organisations often hold vast amounts customer data on record, which can make them prime candidates for cyber-attacks and security breaches. Like at many other types of businesses that are already benefitting from  it, data and AI can play a key role in enhancing the security of transactions.

AI systems can analyse patterns of customer behavior which can help to identify potentially fraudulent activity in real-time. This approach helps both protect customers and the retailer from the financial and reputational damage associated with fraud. For example, in automotive retailers, who process large payments, AI can help to detect and prevent fraudulent activity during the transaction process, ensuring secure and trustworthy payments.

Chatbots for Enhanced Customer Support

Many large consumer goods retailers are already using chatbots to provide instant support, so customer support teams have more time for other, more labour intensive work. With the  creation chatbots now more accessible than ever before, smaller retailers need to realise their benefit to the customer experience.

Chatbots can provide around-the-clock assistance, resolving simple queries and questions at any time of day. These chatbots can be programmed to handle routine tasks, answer frequently asked questions, and guide customers through common issues – all powered by historical data that it is given access to. They can help to improve response time and also free up human resources to focus on more complex and personalised customer interactions, leading to a more satisfied customer service experience.

Whether you are a consumer goods retailer, wholesaler, travel and tourism business or any other type of retail and goods business, the benefit of artificial intelligence on the customer experience is plain to see. From creating new chatbots to personalised customer offers and promotions, AI is leading the way in ensuring that your business is fostering an excellent customer experience.

Are you ready to take this next step in your digital transformation journey?

What can you do next?

At Cloud Direct, we know that using data and AI will be crucial to the long-term success of your retail organisation. As a leading UK Microsoft Solutions Partner and Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, we can assist you in your digital transformation journey.

Whether you’re at the forefront of innovation or just starting out on your digital transformation journey, our experts are here to help you make the most of technology – so let’s talk.

For many local and regional governments in the UK, the ‘do more with less’ slogan is becoming more and more pertinent. Many councils are being told to limit their spending but still achieve high levels of satisfaction with the public services that they offer. One key element of spending that is being impacted is IT and its infrastructure, which forms the backbone of many public services.

The advances in cloud technology mean that council IT leaders can begin to explore alternative cost-effective solutions to counteract the cost and inefficiency of on-premise systems. Cloud technology is often less costly, more secure, offers greater scalability and, for councils, can help to streamline and join up public services that are rooted in innovative data and AI systems.

To reach this end goal, councils need to embrace a digital-first approach and start to break away from legacy systems, taking a cloud-first approach and embracing data and AI. But how do you get started?

The Digital-First Approach

A digital-first approach is not just a technological shift; it’s a strategic mindset that puts local and regional councils in a position to thrive in the digital landscape. As stewards of public services, they are increasingly recognising the importance of embracing digital transformation, particularly through the use of cloud technology and new data and AI systems. A digital-first approach not only recognises the importance of such technology but also the encompassing impact that this new tech can have on all areas of the council. A digital-first approach is a strategic imperative that can enhance efficiency, improve public services, and help foster innovation across the whole organisation.

• With this new approach, a council can start to streamline internal processes, reduce paperwork and manual interventions, and give more time back to its teams. Automated workflows, digital communication channels and data-driven decision-making contribute to operational efficiency, allowing public resources to be allocated more effectively.
• Prioritising digital channels for public services leads to improved delivery. Online platforms, mobile applications, and other digital communication tools provide people with convenient and accessible ways to get information, engage with council services and provide feedback.
• Leveraging the power of data and AI empowers councils to make more informed decisions. By analysing vast amounts of data, a council can identify trends, anticipate the public’s needs, and optimise its services.

Cloud technology can act as a key catalyst to embracing this digital-first approach. For example, Microsoft Azure integration can offer complete flexibility, be cost-effective, has robust security and has a comprehensive set of AI and data tools at your fingertips, such as Copilot, Power BI, and much, much more.

Key Considerations

Embracing digital transformation and making the most of their vast quantities of data  holds great potential for local and regional councils. By prioritising data governance and security, investing in infrastructure, fostering upskilling programmes and engaging effectively with stakeholders, councils can pave the way for smarter and more efficient public services.

Data governance

Robust data governance underlines any successful data and AI initiative. Councils must establish clear policies for data collection, storing and sharing to make sure they meet all regulatory requirements. Maintaining high standards of data quality will enhance the accuracy and reliability of insights from AI, leading to improved public service offerings.

Infrastructure

Taking the time to invest in modern and flexible cloud infrastructure is essential for councils to get the most from their data. Cloud solutions, which include secure data warehouses, can help with creating a seamless integration between different public services. A well-built infrastructure allows for the efficient use of data for AI and analytics tools.

Upskilling

For a successful digital-first approach, local councils will need to consider upskilling their workforce to  help overcome anxiety and job insecurity amongst their staff. Investing in team training in data analytics, AI and related technologies will ensure that a council has the necessary skillsets to get meaningful insights from their data. Upskilling is key to fostering a culture of innovation within your teams.

Stakeholder engagement

Good communication with council stakeholders is important when implementing new digital solutions. Engaging with internal stakeholders creates a sense of inclusion and transparency, and being able to demonstrate the benefits of data and AI as part of your business case helps to improve stakeholder support and adoption.

Ethics of AI

As a council IT leader, it’s important to consider the ethical implications of using data and AI systems. As part of your business case, make sure to create ethical guidelines for data usage and storage, ensuring fairness in AI and avoiding bias in these processes. Sticking to these ethical standards not only safeguards your information and the reputation of your council, but also promotes responsible data and AI usage.

A digital-first approach is not just a technology shift, it’s a change of strategic mindset that can help local and regional councils thrive in the new digital landscape. By prioritising infrastructure, public services and embracing new data and AI solutions, councils can pave the way for better and more cohesive public services. These key considerations outline a roadmap for councils that are looking to embark on this transformation journey – and we can help you get started.

Want to join other councils on this journey?

At Cloud Direct, we understand that using data and AI can be crucial to the success of public services in your council. As a leading UK Microsoft Solutions Partner and Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, we can assist you in your digital transformation journey and provide access to Microsoft nonprofit resources.

From your initial Azure migration to building a sound data strategy and implementing key Microsoft AI services such as OpenAI, Copilot, Power BI and more, our experts can help you kickstart your data and AI journey in the cloud. Get in touch today and find out more or book a free 1:1 Data and AI Innovation Workshop.

The legal sector is historically known for its cautious approach to implementing new technology. However, at Cloud Direct we’ve seen this industry fuelling the demand for Desktop as a Service products, signalling a balancing act between maintaining core legacy systems, whilst embracing some of the advantages of cloud-based solutions.

Cloud migrations can be expensive, and aren’t necessarily a viable solution for all law firms – but that doesn’t mean they’re forced to stick with the status quo. Microsoft’s solution is Azure Virtual Desktops, which enables firms to enhance security, scalability, integration and innovation, all in a cost-effective and accessible manner.

What are legacy applications?

A legacy application refers to a piece of software or a system that was created using older programming languages and technologies and may no longer be actively maintained or supported by the original developers.

Traditionally, legacy applications are installed on a single device and store the data on that computer, meaning devices will need to be manually backed up, encrypted and password protected by IT Teams, taking time and consuming internal resources, while also being a single point of failure.

Despite this issue, law firms continue to rely on legacy applications because they are essential for their day-to-day operations and migrating to newer systems can often seem equally time consuming, complex, and expensive.

What is Azure Virtual Desktop?

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is a complete desktop and application virtualisation solution that runs on the cloud. In the past, virtual desktop solutions have been complex and expensive to set up and manage, making them inaccessible to most small and medium-sized businesses.

By using Microsoft’s extensive cloud platform, AVD changes that. Instead, it’s a cost-effective solution that is easy to deploy, configure and scale. Like all Microsoft Cloud Services, it’s completely flexible to your specific business needs, making it the perfect solution for your firm.

Modernising legacy applications with AVD

Through a virtualised, cloud-based desktop environment, AVD offers secure access to legacy applications. It provides the capability to manage and control access to these applications from any location, device or platform while ensuring the continuous security of your firm’s data.

Applications can be deployed in the cloud, eliminating the burden of managing physical hardware. This enables lawyers to have the freedom to access applications from any location, neglecting the need for additional investment in hardware.

A virtual machine is needed to run legacy applications but, as soon as this is complete, the application can be deployed in the cloud and lawyers can access it from any device or platform.

Ultimately, it’s crucial to configure AVD to ensure the safety of the data. This involves setting up user authentication, authorisation policies and implementing encryption protocols. These security measures facilitates law firms in keeping legacy applications secure and up-to-date.

The benefits of application modernisation

Security

Security stands as a top priority for law firms as they manage clients’ confidential information and personal data. Enhancing security protocols during the application modernisation process, with tools such as multi-factor authentication, can elevate the level of difficulty for bad actors attempting to infiltrate and access sensitive information.

Modernisation

Modernisation not only revitalises the application but also amplifies its agility. This ensures greater responsiveness and adaptability to changing circumstances, making it effortless to introduce new features and functionalities, as well as implement reactive changes and necessary improvements swiftly and seamlessly.

Reliability

The reliability of the application sees improvement through modernisation as it facilitates the quick identification and resolution of bugs or glitches. It also ensures there is no single point of failure – a fault  with a single server will no longer bring the firm to a complete standstill. This, in turn, minimises downtimes and ensures a smooth and efficient operation of the application.

Want to find out more about Azure Virtual Desktop? Talk to the experts.

The benefits of Azure Virtual Desktop are endless – especially when it comes to modernising legacy applications for your law firm.

If you want to find out more about Azure Virtual Desktop or have any burning questions, then you’re in luck. Microsoft has identified us as one of a handful of Azure Virtual Desktop Specialist Partners.

Whether you’re in the cloud or on-premise, you will have an Operating Model in place that defines how technology supports your business – but when was it last updated? In 2020, 87 per cent of CEOs expected their operating models to change in the three years that followed as they delved deeper into the world of digital transformation. But the importance of updating it promptly can often be overlooked, which will only hinder your ability to achieve long-term technology operation success.

For those that have already migrated their servers to the cloud, has that change been reflected in your operating model? And for the businesses that are looking to migrate in 2024, what considerations should be made when adopting a Cloud Operating Model?

What is a Cloud Operating Model?

Microsoft defines a Cloud Operating Model as ‘the collection of processes and procedures that define how you want to operate technology in the cloud.’ After detailing your Cloud Strategy, the Cloud Operating Model will provide a high-level representation of how your business will deliver on that strategy, breaking each section down into individual methodologies.

Operating Models have been around for decades as teams have always had to define how technology would support their business. However, while some processes may remain relevant from your legacy Operating Model when you migrate to the cloud, many will change and impact the way your IT team operates.

What you should consider

When migrating to the cloud, it’s important to consider the processes you currently have in place and how they will change once you’ve migrated. There’s a lot to look at, and potentially a lot of changes to make in order to ensure successful long-term cloud adoption, so our team has been busy identifying the seven key considerations you should be making when building a Cloud Operating Model.

People

When you’re in the cloud, the skills your IT team needs will change dramatically. Gone are the days that required boots on the ground to physically maintain and manage your on-premise infrastructure. Instead, your team will need to be adept at monitoring a cloud environment, either themselves or with the support of a Cloud Provider, and will need to want to work with cutting edge technology to drive business innovation. The benefit of hiring the best cloud talent is that often you can upskill the resource and reallocate to different functions to drive competitive advantage and ultimately improve business performance, increase revenue, enhance customer experience – but your current team should not be overlooked, and upskilling and training programmes should be considered.

Technology

When transitioning to an Operating Model that’s geared up to support your cloud environment, it’s important that you consider how your tools and technology will change, along with how you support that. This can be broken down into three key areas:

• Infrastructure: When you’re on-premise, your infrastructure is restrictive and inflexible. Network connectivity is configured traditionally and reporting and analytics are limited. When you move to cloud you will benefit from an increase in the number of compute nodes as they can be spun up almost instantly, and in vast quantities. This provides a more dynamic environment, but requires more consistent oversight to ensure that you are extracting the maximum ROI from your technology.
• Physical servers: In the cloud you’ll need to adopt virtual machines, and more of them than you had physical servers. You’ll have to ensure you have new processes for people and technology to keep track of these.
• Analytics: On-premise offers limited analytics solutions and therefore limited insights. In the cloud, you’ll be able to gain more business insights from its wealth of analytics capabilities, but in turn you will need a add deeper analytical skills and expertise to your team.

Processes

Your full list of business processes is likely innumerable, making it one of the biggest areas of consideration when adopting a Cloud Operating Model. Moving to a cloud environment will impact on areas of your business that you may not have thought would be changed, so make sure you consider each of the following.

• Procurement: Not only will never products and services you procure need to be compatible with the cloud, you will also need to begin procuring suppliers and providers in new areas – starting with a Cloud Vendor, who will help your business make a smooth, seamless transition to the cloud.
• Problem management: On-premise problem management is a very hands-on process with lots of patching, troubleshooting and hardware replacement. However, when you’re in the cloud, there’s a greater focus on solving connectivity, availability, and configuration – your cloud provider will resolve any infrastructure problems.
• Ticket management: This will change from a manual tracking of issues with communication from the IT department to streamlined, automated systems that can be quickly escalated to the relevant teams, decreasing resolution times and reducing the impact of disruptions.
• Identity management: The way in which your team accesses its servers will change drastically to ensure your data remains safe and secure. You’ll need more than a key to gain access, so your Cloud Operating Model should include considerations like multi-factor authentication and trusted networks.
• Change management: This becomes a much more dynamic process in the cloud as your provider will assist with any updates or upgrades. It will Minimise disruption to users, and allow you to allocate some resources elsewhere.
• Data sovereignty: When you’re managing on-premise datacentres, you are fully responsible for that. In the cloud that changes to a shared responsibility between your business and your Cloud Provider, meaning your Compliance team would need to adapt your approach to continue adhering to regulations.
• Backup & Data Recovery: In an on-premise world, you would have had to invest quite a lot of time, effort and money in backups for datacentre upgrades, repairs, and maintenance. In the cloud, this is all automated at a much lower cost and allows for data recovery from a wide range of locations. Giving you peace of mind.

Finance

Your finances and how you manage them will change considerably when your business is in the cloud, so be prepared.

CapEx to OpEx: The biggest change will be moving away from Capital Expenditure (CapEx), where you spend a lot upfront on hardware with potentially significant Operational Expenditure (OpEx)on maintenance, which leads to an inflexible financial strategy. When in the cloud you prioritise OpEx spending, which can be scaled efficiently and spread over many financial periods, with fewer areas of spend – the Cloud Provider covers maintenance and other costs. However, we recommend that this is paired with a FinOps strategy to ensure investments are managed effectively, and the financial benefits of cloud are fully realised.

Operational expenditure drops: When in the cloud, you will notice that your operational costs will drop significantly. These costs are baked into the cloud pricing and the responsibility of these tasks are performed by your cloud vendor, giving you greater flexibility to reinvest any leftover budget.

Moving to a Cloud Operating Model will enable you to ultimately move from an inflexible financial strategy to an agile one, so it’s a great time to factor in how you can use that to your advantage and invest in innovation.

Security and Governance

When you shift to the cloud, the parameters in which attackers can target increase as you move from needing physical access to attack to digital. With this in mind, it’s advisable to adopt a Zero Trust approach. This requires a change in mindset – instead of assuming everything behind your firewall is safe, you should assume breach and verify each request as it comes from an open network. Zero Trust encourages you “never trust, always verify”, meaning cyberattacks don’t slip through the gaps. With a Zero Trust approach, there will be more of a focus on identity management, and while this can be quite a large configuration task as part of your migration, there are plenty of tools that come with your Azure platform from Microsoft, ready for you to adopt in order to follow a Zero Trust approach.

Timescale

It’s no secret that the cloud improves business and IT agility by speeding up processes. Slow timescales and mundane processes will be a thing of the past once you have shifted your Operating Model to the cloud, but be sure to consider the following process changes.

• Instant access to adopting new IT: The beauty of the cloud is the being able to adopt new technologies almost instantly, allowing your teams to start innovating quicker than ever before.
• Maintenance updates: There’s no longer the need for an internal IT team to manually maintain and update your infrastructure. When you move to cloud, your infrastructure will be maintained by your Cloud Vendor, which results in quicker updates due to their expertise and the scale at which they operate.
• Development cycles: When you’re in the cloud you can adopt tools to help you move away from traditional development methods to DevOps. This allows you to efficiently respond to customer needs and build applications quicker than ever before.
• Hardware refresh: On-premise hardware refresh cycles often end up being long and drawn-out processes that happen every few years, which are often locked in as soon as the decision is made. When your Operating Model is in the cloud you will have a near-constant view on various metrics that will dictate what scaling and flexibility is required, allowing you to optimise your cloud environment and maximise your investment.

Strategy

Finally, your Cloud Strategy is what brings everything together to integrate it with your wider business strategy, rather than having separate and often conflicting approaches. While the IT team is largely responsible for managing your cloud environment, it’s a business decision to migrate to cloud and therefore should be part of a strategic business strategy and way of working. The IT Team will move away from focusing on just keeping the lights on, to leveraging the latest technology to drive business optimisation and innovation.

Looking to shift to a Cloud Operating Model?

Are you looking to adopt a Cloud Operating Model, but not sure where to start? These seven considerations will get you going in the right direction, but when it comes to migrating it’s important that you have a Managed Service Provider in place that takes time to help you understand your long-term strategic goals and align your Cloud Operating Model with the needs and requirements of your business.

Simply get in touch with our Azure experts to help you start your successful cloud migration.

By 10 October 2023, Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 will no longer receive extended support, posing potential risks to your infrastructure and applications. It is essential to consider upgrading or migrating to a supported version to maintain security and reliability. 

To prevent security breaches and ensure you remain compliant with industry regulations, now is the optimal time to start planning your migration in order to mitigate these risks. This process will involve migrating your workloads to newer, supported versions, such as Windows Server 2022, or purchasing Extended Security Updates (ESUs). 

One of the primary concerns arising from the end of Windows Server 2012 support is that your business will lose compliance with PCI, GDPR, and other relevant regulatory agencies. With the cessation of support, your applications and infrastructure will no longer receive updates or vendor support, automatically rendering your business non-compliant.  

Once the support for Windows Server 12 ends, your organisation will lose the capability to receive support in case of a security threat. With no dependable vendor to offer assistance, your business will become vulnerable to potential security threats.  

By delaying the migration or upgrade from Windows Server 2012 until the last minute, you will be left without a secure solution in place by the time support ends. It is essential to plan to prevent security breaches and loss of reputation.  

Migrating to Microsoft Azure 

You have the option to migrate your applications and databases to various solutions in Azure, such as Azure VMware Solution, Azure Stack HCI, Virtual Machines, and Dedicated Host. By doing so, you become eligible to receive free ESUs for three years after October 10, 2023. Additionally, you can take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit, which allows you to apply your existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. This provides a cost-effective and efficient way to maintain security, as well as compliance, while benefiting from the capabilities of Microsoft Azure’s cloud services. 

Remain on-premises and upgrade to Windows Server 2022 

If your business requires an on-premise solution, there are two options. Firstly, you can upgrade to Windows Server 2022, which will provide you with the latest security updates and features. Alternatively, you can purchase ESUs for Windows Server 2012 which will grant you three years of continued security updates. The ESUs are renewable on an annual basis until 13 October 2026.  

For seamless management and enhanced security, you can use Azure Arc, which allows Microsoft to automatically deploy the purchased ESUs on your on-premise infrastructure. Furthermore, Azure Arc enables the extension of Azure’s security and governance features to your on-premise environment, providing your firm with a comprehensive and integrated solution. 

What is the next step? 

Change can be overwhelming, and planning your migration strategy can be a complex task. However, the key is to understand the options you have, make an informed decision and pursue the right technology for your business.

Our cloud migration assessment offers a comprehensive evaluation of the technical and economic aspects involved in transitioning to Azure. This assessment provides you with a strategic roadmap and a detailed business case for migrating your on-premise infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.  

Additionally, as an established Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, we have access to Microsoft assessments and funding to help you on every step of your Azure journey.

Data is shaping the world. It is having a profound impact on businesses, governments, charities and individuals alike,  changing the way we live, work, talk, share, sleep, interact and learn. For businesses and charities it is helping to improve their products and services, allowing them to make better decisions and target their marketing more effectively, while governments are improving public services and making better policy decisions. Individuals, meanwhile, are able to make better financial decisions, stay healthy, and connect with friends and family.

The growth of data is evident:

• The amount of data created in the world doubles every two years
• By 2025, the world will have generated 175 zettabytes of data
• 90 per cent of the world’s current data has been created in the last two years
• 70 per cent of all data is unstructured
• 80 per cent of all data resides in the cloud

The amount of data available to businesses is growing at an unprecedented rate. This is accelerating a new era of data-driven decision-making, with those that can harness the true power of data putting themselves at a significant competitive advantage.

The growth of data is a major challenge – just think of the storage required – but it also presents a great opportunity. By harnessing the power of data, we can create a better future for ourselves and for the world. This new paradigm necessitates a shift towards data-driven decision making, powered by robust technologies like the Microsoft Cloud technology stack.

The Microsoft Cloud technology stack, which consists of services such as Azure, Power BI, and Microsoft 365, provides comprehensive tools that enable businesses to harness the power of their data effectively. Let’s explore how businesses can leverage these tools to extract meaningful insights and drive informed business decisions.

 

Utilising Azure for data storage and management

We firmly believe that Microsoft Azure stands head and shoulders above the rest as a premier cloud computing service – that why we do what we do. The data storage, analytics, and machine learning capabilities it offers are unparalleled.

When it comes to driving business decisions with data, there is no denying the sheer importance of data quality, its ease of accessibility, and its effective management. Azure not only meets these requirements – it smashes them out of the park while offering scalable storage solutions that adjust effortlessly to your business needs.

The list goes on – its data management capabilities are nothing short of stellar, allowing for streamlined and efficient data handling, and its advanced data analytics tools are a true game-changer, providing the power to extract meaningful insights from your data. Azure is the gold standard in the realm of cloud computing services.

Azure is the world leader for reliable, scalable and secure data storage platforms. By utilising the following technologies, it will transform how your business handles, stores and maximises its data.

• Azure Blob Storage is a highly scalable and durable object storage service that can be used to store any type of unstructured data, such as images, videos, and text files. This benefits from unrivalled scalability and durability to meet the needs of even the most demanding workloads and events.
• Azure SQL Database is a highly reliable platform, with a 99.9 per cent uptime service level agreement. It provides a relational database service that can be used to store and manage more structured data, making it a good choice for storing data that needs to be accessed and referenced frequently.
• Azure Data Lake Storage is a scalable and secure data lake storage service that can be used to store and manage both structured and unstructured data. It’s a great choice for storing large amounts of data that need to be processed in a variety of ways.

 

Leveraging Power BI for data visualisation

Being able to visualise your data truly unlocks its potential, making understanding complex datasets and extracting meaningful insights a much simpler process. Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics tool that crafts raw data into understandable and visually appealing information.

By integrating Power BI with Azure, companies can create interactive dashboards and reports that present real-time insights into business operations. This visual representation allows for easier interpretation of data, which leads to quicker and more accurate decision-making.

 

Creating interactive dashboards

• Power BI dashboards allow users to interact with data in real time. This means that users can drill down into data, filter it, and slice it to see different perspectives with a level of interactivity the helps users to better understand the data and, ultimately, make more informed decisions.
• Power BI offers a variety of data visualisations that can be used to represent data in engaging ways for a variety of audiences.

 

Improve collaboration with Microsoft 365 and Power Platform

You shouldn’t make business-critical decisions alone – and with Microsoft 365’s range of cloud-based productivity tools, there’s no need to:

• Microsoft Planner is a task management tool that can be used to create and track tasks. You can assign tasks to team members, set deadlines, and track their progress, helping to keep everyone on the same page and ensure that projects are completed on time. For example, a sales team can use Microsoft Planner to create a task management plan for a new sales campaign, helping the team to stay on track and to meet their sales goals.
• Microsoft Power Automate is a low-code/no-code automation platform that can be used to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for team members to focus on more important tasks. A finance team could, for example, use Power Automate to create a workflow that automatically extracts data from financial reports, which can then be used to create new reports and dashboards that enable better financial decision making.
• Microsoft SharePoint is a document management system that can be used to store, organise, and share documents in collaborative workspaces. This can help to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of losing important documents. This could be a customer service team using SharePoint to create a shared workspace where team members can collaborate on customer inquiries, allowing the team to resolve issues more quickly and efficiently.
• Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based collaboration platform that brings people together to chat, share files, and work on projects together across teams, departments and locations. This can help to break down silos and improve communication and collaboration, especially in today’s hybrid-first working environment.

 

Maximising data-driven decision-making with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is the stitching together of Microsoft Azure tools. It represents the next evolution in data analytics and business intelligence, creating a singular, unified platform that is designed to empower businesses to leverage their data effectively, streamline analytics processes, and ultimately make more informed, data-driven decisions.

 

1. Unified analytics platform

Fabric is an end-to-end analytics platform that consolidates the capabilities of Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into one cohesive product. This integration significantly simplifies the process of extracting insights from data and presenting it to business users, eliminating the need for complex integrations between multiple products from different vendors. With Fabric, all the necessary capabilities for data-driven decision-making are available in one place, with a unified experience and architecture.

 

2. Core workloads

Fabric includes seven core workloads, each offering a unique set of capabilities for data and analytics. These workloads cover everything from data engineering to real-time analytics and AI-driven analytics, providing businesses with the tools they need to make data-driven decisions. With these workloads, businesses can orchestrate data pipelines, build sophisticated AI models, analyse real-time data, and visualise insights, all within a single platform.

 

3. OneLake: the OneDrive for data

One particularly unique feature of Fabric is OneLake, a multi-cloud data lake that is automatically available to every Fabric tenant. OneLake allows businesses to centralise their data, making it easier to discover, share, and govern. By eliminating data silos, OneLake ensures that all relevant information is available for analysis, thereby enabling more comprehensive and accurate data-driven decisions.

 

4. Scalability and security

Because it is built with scalability and security in mind, Fabric is capable of handling the needs of businesses of all sizes, and its robust security and governance framework ensures that data is always protected and compliant with relevant regulations.

By integrating the powerful tools of Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI, Fabric enables businesses to effectively harness their data, streamline their analytics processes, and ultimately make more informed, data-driven decisions. This unified analytics platform is a significant step forward in the evolution of data analytics and business intelligence, providing businesses with the comprehensive tools they need to truly become data-driven​.

 

Data governance and quality control: a foundation for data-driven decision making

Effective data governance and quality control are critical components in making informed, data-driven decisions. They provide the necessary assurance that the data being used to inform these decisions is accurate, reliable, secure and up-to-date. Let’s explore how data governance and quality control support data-driven decision making.

 

1. Data governance

Data governance encompasses the processes, roles, policies, and technologies that organisations use to manage and ensure the quality of their data. By defining clear data ownership, data access rules, and data standards, data governance enables organisations to maintain consistent, high-quality data across the organisation.

For example, in the context of Microsoft Fabric, OneLake’s unified data storage system enforces policy and security settings centrally, ensuring that the right people have access to the right data. This data governance feature not only protects sensitive information but also facilitates efficient data sharing and collaboration, which are crucial for effective decision making.

 

2. Data quality control

Data quality control involves checking data for accuracy and consistency to ensure it is reliable and can be used to make informed decisions. Without proper quality control, inaccurate or inconsistent data can lead to flawed insights and poor business decisions.

An example of this could be a retail company using Fabric to analyse customer purchasing behaviour. If the data used in the analysis is of a poor quality, incorrect insights might be generated, such as overestimating the popularity of a certain product. However, with effective quality control processes in place, the company can be confident in the accuracy of their data and the insights derived from it.

 

3. Support for Data-Driven Decisions

Data governance and quality control provide a robust framework that supports data-driven decision making in several ways:

1. • Reliability: They ensure the data used in decision-making processes is accurate, consistent, and trustworthy
   • Compliance: They help organisations adhere to data protection laws and regulations, mitigating legal and financial risks
   • Efficiency: They streamline data management processes, making it easier for business users to find and use the data they need
   • Security: They protect sensitive data from unauthorised access, maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of the data

For instance, in a healthcare setting, data security and compliance would be critical. Patient data must be handled with strict adherence to regulations. In the UK alone, legislation governing the use and protection of personal data, including health information, is enshrined in the Data Protection Act of 2018, an act which also incorporates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Data governance and quality control measures should ensure that such sensitive information is securely managed and accurately maintained, in turn supporting the healthcare provider’s data-driven decisions.

 

So, what is next?

The Microsoft Cloud technology stack provides a comprehensive solution for companies looking to leverage data in their business decisions. By offering scalable data storage, advanced analytics, insightful customer data, and collaborative tools, Microsoft empowers businesses to truly make the most of their data.

However, leveraging these tools effectively requires a deep understanding of each tool’s capabilities and a strategic approach to data management. It is about transforming the culture of a business, to value and rely on its data, encouraging curiosity, and fostering a willingness to make decisions based on the information at hand, rather than instinct.

The Microsoft Cloud technology stack is a powerful ally and, when paired with the right partner, you can unlock the full potential of your data to drive business success.

 

Written by

Leon Godwin
Principal Cloud Evangelist
LinkedIn | Twitter

Building and managing applications or software can often be complex. But it doesn’t have to be. Adopting a microservices approach to your application development can improve the way you build, secure and sell your app – allowing you to deploy new features and react to any issues effectively. According to a report from Nginx, 36% of enterprise businesses are already using Microservices within their business, and an additional 26% are researching. It’s safe to say Microservices are quickly being adopted by businesses of all shapes and sizes since the approach was first launched in 2011.

Firstly, what is Microservices?

Microsoft describes Microservices as an architectural approach to building applications where each core function, or service, is built and deployed independently. Microservice architecture is distributed and loosely coupled, so one component’s failure won’t break the whole app. Independent components work together and communicate with well-defined API contracts. In short, Microservices allows your developers to experiment by rolling out an isolated new feature and simplify the debugging and maintenance process.

Enabling you to fail faster (and smarter) and increase the overall productivity of your development team.

Benefits of Microservices

There are many benefits of using Microservices to build applications. Here are six key benefits identified by Microsoft:

• Agility – Microservices enable you to update a feature without the need of redeploying an entire application. This is because Microservices are deployed independently of each other.
• Small, focused teams – Microservices will be small enough so that a small team will be able to build, test and deploy it efficiently. Having small, focused teams will increase agility compared to larger widespread teams.
• Mix of technologies – your teams will be able to easily pick up new technologies that best suit their software or application.
• Fault isolation – if you are ever faced with an individual microservice becoming unavailable, it won’t disrupt the rest of your application or software as it operates independently. Assuming that your Microservice has been designed to handle any faults correctly.
• Scalability – you’ll have the flexibility to scale Microservices without having to scale the entire application or software. Allowing you to effectively utilise your resources.
• Data isolation – you’ll be able to easily perform schema updates as only a single microservice will be updated rather than an entire application or piece of software.

How Microservices works with DevOps

Microservices can often be complex due to the range of moving parts involved, which is why it’s important to adopt DevOps alongside Microservices to help with deployment, monitoring and lifecycle automation.

DevOps brings together siloed jobs such as IT operations, development teams, quality assurance and security to create a more fluid way of working that encourages collaboration. Which allows you to produce better applications or software by having all those roles working towards a common goal.

Microservices is often described as optimised for DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), this is because they are smaller services that can be deployed more frequently. Deploying Microservices will help you successfully adopt DevOps – why? Because Microservices architecture requires DevOps to run effectively.

Adopting Microservices

If you’re looking to build resilient, scalable and distributed applications, Microsoft Cloud can help you deploy Microservices. Here are four benefits of adopting Microservices with Microsoft Azure:

Build and deploy services with agility

Building your Microservices in Azure will enable you to easily manage any new features, updates and bug fixes within an individual component without having to re-deploy the entire application. Meaning your development team will be able to save time deploying features and focus on innovating your application. You’ll also be able to automate any software delivery workflows with a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline such as GitHub Actions.

Scale your Microservices with demand

Hosting your application in Azure will provide your developers with the ability to scale individual Microservices and subsystems based on your specific resource needs without having to scale the entire application. You’ll have the ability to pack a higher density of services into a single host by leveraging container orchestrator through tools such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Create resilient applications

Microservices enable you to create resilient applications by using patterns such as circuit breaking to help tolerate individual service failure. This will also allow you to replace or retire individual services without affecting the entire application. Microsoft have tools available to help make this easier for you by installing a service mesh using the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh for Azure Red Hat OpenShift.

Find the perfect approach for your team

Within Microsoft Azure you’ll have the ability to find the best approach for your team, allowing them to excel at what they do best. You’ll have the freedom to choose your team’s preferred deployment approach, language, microservices platform and programming model for each service.

Tools available and how they can help impact Microservices

Microsoft have ensured they have a range of tools available for you to leverage within Azure to help successfully deploy microservices.

• Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
• Azure Red Hat OpenShift
• Azure functions
• Azure container apps
• Azure cosmos DB
• Azure container registry
• Azure API management

You can learn more about these tools on Microsoft’s website.

Are you looking to adopt Microservices?

The benefits of adopting microservices are clear. So, if you’re looking to deploy microservices across your business, look no further. We’re a Microsoft DevOps, Application Development and Application Integration partner. In other words, there’s no better partner to have on your side.

Ready to find out how you can start adopting microservices within your business? Simply get in touch to speak to an expert.

 

The landscape of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions has changed. SIEM solutions historically were complicated, expensive and difficult to manage. However, today’s cloud based SIEMs are far more accessible to businesses.   

By adopting a cloud native SIEM, like Microsoft Sentinel, you don’t have to build or maintain any infrastructure and there are no upfront costs. You only pay for what you use.  

So, should you ditch your current SIEM for Microsoft Sentinel? We’ll let you decide. Here are 8 reasons why we think it’s worth considering.  

Rapid Deployment time 

Unlike traditional on-premises SIEM systems that have long deployment times and require a lot of configurations, a Microsoft Sentinel deployment can be completed in substantially less time with a fraction of the resources.  

This, coupled with Sentinel’s hundreds of out-the-box integrations, means that you can begin generating actionable insights from your event logs faster than ever before. 

Microsoft Sentinel has seamless security integrations 

By leveraging the power of the Microsoft Cloud, Sentinel takes traditional SIEM technologies to the next level to monitor your entire IT estate – irrespective of whether your workloads exist in Azure, on-premises or non-Microsoft cloud platforms. 

Azure Sentinel comes with a rich portfolio of native and third-party integrations that strengthen your organisation’s security capabilities. This is achieved through connectors that connect to data sources across your entire IT estate.  

By leveraging AI and machine learning, Sentinel is continuously learning and becoming ‘smarter’ as it’s being fed data from your environment. Thus, the more data sources you have connected, the more value Sentinel can provide.  

Makes threat protection smarter and faster with machine learning and artificial intelligence 

With traditional SIEM solutions, legitimate behaviors and actions are frequently misclassified as correlated attacks. These alerts are called False Positives, and they drain the time, resources and willpower of the IT teams investigating them. This is commonly referred to as alert fatigue and can cause legitimate threats to dwell in your environment for longer. 

Sentinel uses artificial intelligence and machine learning that’s been built up over the past decade to ensure that it only notifies you of the security incidents that require your immediate attention. Thus, eliminating false positives and keeping your IT security teams checked in.  

Scalability 

Sentinel allows businesses to swiftly deploy and customise their SIEM. There’s no need to fuss about installing hardware or performing manual maintenance and upgrades. And since it’s built on Azure, it offers virtually limitless cloud scale while addressing all your security needs.  

Better yet, Microsoft Sentinel takes care of updates and patches for you, without requiring any additional cost or effort. 

Reduced downtime 

The cloud now plays a crucial role in mitigating downtime for business-critical applications. Built-in load-balancing and automated fail-over make Azure a secure, robust platform for operations. By moving your SIEM into Azure, you can take advantage of the same availability benefits. Logs continue to be collected and analysed, ensuring that no alerts are missed, and that disruption is minimised.  

From an operational standpoint, reducing downtime will help you maintain a resilient security posture and address issues swiftly. Improving your SIEMs availability will also help to reduce downtime across the rest of your IT estate. 

Better Value for Money 

As is the case with all of Microsoft’s cloud solutions, Microsoft Sentinel is billed on a per-usage basis. Thus, shifting your SIEM to the cloud allows your business to take advantage of the operational expenditure (OpEx) payment model and avoid hefty capital investment into on-premises infrastructure. 

Sentinel also avoids the problem of estimating future storage requirements or purchasing additional capacity that gathers dust until it is required. Instead, cloud storage can be activated whenever required – and you never pay for it until it is used. Once factors like licensing, storage and infrastructure are considered, Azure Sentinel is typically 48% less expensive to run than other on-premises SIEM solutions. 

Compliance

In today’s hybrid cloud world, managing the network security perimeter and detecting unauthorised access has become increasingly challenging. However, regulatory bodies make no allowances for complexity. 

Microsoft Sentinel is designed to address the specific challenges of hybrid operating environments – even in the most heavily regulated industries: 

• The cloud-based platform offers massive scalability potential so you can collect and retain vast amounts of security log data. 
• Support for all common log formats means that Sentinel can track security issues across all of your systems, regardless of where they are located. 
• Security logs are centralised and collated into a single platform. This makes it easier to assess the IT estate as a whole or to drill down into its constituent parts. 
• Using bookmarks and notebooks, your SOC team can document complex security issues for review by auditors or law enforcement. 
• Converting notebooks into playbooks will formalise your response to future security events, ensuring that the SOC team are properly prepared to act quickly. 

Microsoft’s proven security pedigree

Given the importance of the cloud in corporate IT plans, Microsoft has been actively investing in protecting the Azure platform, paying upwards of $1 billion every year. This rate of spend beats other SIEM suppliers, making it very appealing to companies trying to strengthen their own defenses. Because of this consumer trust, Microsoft generated $10 billion in sales in 2021, a 40% increase over the previous year.

Better yet, Microsoft Security is a Leader in four of the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ reports.

Looking to test-drive Microsoft Sentinel in your organisation?

Find out how Microsoft Sentinel could benefit your organisation with our Microsoft Sentinel Cloud Accelerator Workshop. During this workshop, you’ll get an overview of Azure Sentinel along with insights on active threats to your Microsoft 365 cloud and on-premises environments.

It’s no secret that the past two years have reshaped how we engage in work and think about security, accelerating the widespread adoption of cloud and remote-access solutions. The security perimeter of today’s workplace extends far beyond the office, and organisations require a security solution that’s able to keep pace with flexible working patterns and provide a centralised view across a decentralised digital estate.

Introducing Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft’s cloud-native Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solution.

In this article, we’ll cover the key differences between traditional, on-premises SIEM solutions and Microsoft Sentinel – Microsoft’s cloud-native SIEM solution.

What are SIEMs and SOARs?

SIEM, or Security Information and Event Management, is a security system that assists organisations in identifying possible security threats and vulnerabilities before they interrupt business operations. It detects anomalous user behavior and uses artificial intelligence to automate many of the manual processes associated with threat detection and incident response. It has become a staple in modern security operation centers (SOCs) for security and compliance management use cases.

SOAR, or Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response, refers to technologies that allow businesses to collect inputs that are monitored by the security operations team. Alerts from the SIEM system and other security technologies help define, prioritise and drive standardised incident response activities by employing a combination of human and machine power.

What is Microsoft Sentinel?

Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM and SOAR solution that gives you a birds-eye view across your organisation’s entire technology ecosystem. It monitors signals and data from all applications, services, infrastructure, networks, and users – irrespective of if it exists in Azure, on-prem or other cloud services.

Where Sentinel fits in with your security stack

Microsoft Sentinel sits at the very top of your security ecosystem by integrating and gathering data from all your existing security solutions. Meaning, the more security solutions you have in place, the more value Sentinel can provide. Sentinel leverages AI and machine learning that’s been built up over the past decade, Sentinel scans all the signals from your environment and only alerts you of the critical security events that require your attention.

How Microsoft Sentinel compares to traditional SIEMs

Is now the perfect time to ditch your traditional SIEM solution for Microsoft Sentinel? We’ll let you decide by comparing the two on a cost, usability, performance and ease of deployment basis. Let’s dive straight into it.

Cost

A key difference between traditional and cloud native SIEMS is start-up costs. On-premises solutions require large capital investment into hardware and software that needs to be manually upgraded and maintained over time. Microsoft Sentinel significantly reduces your infrastructure costs by shifting spend from Capex to Opex. Meaning, you pay for what you use with no up-front costs. In late 2020, Forrester released a report titled The Total Economic Impact of Azure Sentinel, that highlighted the cost benefits of the Sentinel. Here’s what they found:

• A three-year 201 percent return on investment (ROI) with a payback period of less than six months.
• A 48 percent reduction in costs compared to legacy SIEM solutions, saving on expenses like licensing, storage, and infrastructure costs.
• A 79 percent reduction in false positives and 80 percent reduction in the amount of labor associated with investigation, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) over three years.
• A 67 percent decrease in time to deployment compared to legacy on-premises SIEMs.

Usability

With traditional SIEM solutions, legitimate behaviours and actions are frequently misclassified as correlated attacks. These alerts are called False Positives, and they drain the time, resources and willpower of the IT teams investigating them. This is commonly referred to as alert fatigue and can cause legitimate threats to dwell in your environment for longer.

Ease of use is a key trend among cloud solutions, and Microsoft Sentinel is no different. Sentinel uses artificial intelligence and machine learning that’s been built up over the past decade to ensure that it only notifies you of the security incidents that require your immediate attention. Thus, eliminating false positives and keeping your IT security teams checked in. And since it’s built on Azure, it offers virtually limitless cloud scale while addressing all your security needs.

Performance

Detection analysis in on-premises SIEMs is frequently postponed until traffic flow is less taxing on the system. When the SIEM’s events per second (EPS) were set to their maximum, querying and correlating data became much slower.

Threats can be identified in real-time with a modern cloud based SIEM, such as Microsoft Sentinel, with less bandwidth overhead and enhanced processing power. As logs are delivered into the SIEM, they are analysed instantly. Because the technology is hosted on the Microsoft cloud and scales automatically, the collection of logs has no effect on the speed at which it queries and correlates data.

Ease of deployment

Historically, SIEM solutions were riddled with complications, necessitating a high level of knowledge to deploy and manage. However, today’s cloud based SIEMs are built to be easy to deploy and administer by anyone with a basic understanding of IT. Meaning, organisations do not need to hire additional personnel to manage it. This not only affects the cost of deploying a SIEM, but also the deployment lead times.

The deployment process for an on-premises SIEM is manual and very lengthy. However, due to the nature of SaaS, high availability and ease of deployment comes as part of Microsoft Sentinel’s design. Sentinel allows businesses to swiftly deploy and customise their SIEM. There’s no need to fuss about installing hardware or performing manual maintenance and upgrades. And since it’s built on Azure, it offers virtually limitless cloud scale while addressing all your security needs.

With on-premises SIEMs, keeping up to date with new technologies and capabilities can be overwhelming and often very costly. In contrast, Sentinel takes care of updates and patches for you, without requiring any additional cost or effort.

Common SIEM challenges faced by IT Security professionals

Last year, Panther Labs conducted research that surveyed over 400 security professionals who actively use a traditional SIEM solution as part of their day-to-day work to gain insight into their current SIEM challenges, desires and frustrations. Here’s what they found:

• 18% of respondents indicated that it took more than 12 months to deploy and implement their SIEM solution
• 24% said that the biggest challenge with their SIEM platform was too many alerts
• 46% said that cost of their SIEM solution did not align with its capabilities
• More than 50% of respondents stated that they are dissatisfied with their current SIEM platform’s visibility
• The largest group of respondents said big data infrastructure and scalability would be the two most important capabilities if they were evaluating a new SIEM vendor

Looking to trial Microsoft Sentinel for your organisation?

Find out how Microsoft Sentinel could benefit your organisation with our Microsoft Sentinel Cloud Accelerator Workshop. During this workshop, you’ll get an overview of Azure Sentinel along with insights on active threats to your Microsoft 365 cloud and on-premises environments.

As a software vendor, you’re always looking for new ways to modernise your application through innovation and efficiency. Most organisations migrate their application to the cloud to benefit from continuous integration and delivery. And if you don’t keep up with this change, your application will soon become outdated and quickly fall behind your competitors.

If you aren’t familiar with DevOps, read our blog post How DevOps compares to traditional development methods.

 

Recap on DevOps

Microsoft defines DevOps as; A compound of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is the union of people, processes and technology to continually provide value to customers.

By adopting a DevOps culture alongside the right practices and tools your team will be able to efficiently respond to customer needs and build applications quicker than ever. DevOps brings together siloed jobs such as IT operations, development teams, quality assurance and security to create a more fluid way of working that encourages collaboration. Which enables you to produce better applications or software by having all of those roles working towards a common goal.

According to the Accelerate State of DevOps report 2019, the cloud has positively impacted the DevOps process by enabling you to achieve:

• 106x faster lead time from committing to deploy
• 208xmore frequent code deployments
• 2604xfaster time to recover from incidents and 
• 7xlower change failure rate.

 

What is DevOps as a Service

DevOps as a Service is an emerging solution that’s becoming increasingly popular in application development. It moves traditional collaboration between the development and operations teams into the cloud. This enables a lot of the processes to be automated via stackable virtual tools. In short, adopting DevOps as a Service allows you to improve unit testing, code tracking and review, automated deployment, bug tracking and monitoring.

So, what are the benefits of adopting DevOps as a Service?

Increased team efficiency and faster deployments

Adopting DevOps as a Service will enable you to increase your team’s efficiency and enable faster deployments. Why? Because you’ll be adopting some of the latest cloud tools that’ll facilitate and orchestrate DevOps. Having these tools enables your business to set up automation that will help you create an efficient software delivery process.

Enables your team to focus on innovating your application

Enabling DevOps as a Service will enable your developers to focus on what they do best, innovating and improving your application. This is because they will have access to best-in-class tools and have the right processes in place to allow for shorter development time, increased collaboration and faster delivery time. You’ll also be able to leverage your cloud partners’ knowledge and support.

 

The business case for DevOps as a service

If you’re looking to create a scalable application in the cloud, then DevOps as a Service is a solution you should consider leveraging. You’ll be able to reap all the benefits listed above which will enable your business to grow, increase developer velocity, leverage modern tools and continuously develop your application.

Leverage modern ways of working

It’s important to ensure that your developers are following modern ways of working and have the latest tools available at their disposal – allowing them to build efficiently, collaborate securely, and scale innovation. This is why it’s crucial that your business adopts modern ways of working, such as DevOps, Microservices and Containers, and the latest tools, such as Azure, GitHub, Visual Studio and PowerApps. Not only will this enable your business to work effectively, but it would also allow you to attract industry-leading talent that wants to stay with your business. Organisations with strong tools are 65 percent more innovative and have 47 percent higher developer satisfaction and retention rates than those in the lowest quartile for Developer Velocity.

Increase developer velocity

Did you know that organisations with Developer Velocity in the top quartile achieve 4-5 times faster revenue growth and 55% higher innovation?

Empower your developers to drive innovation. We all know that software development is at the heart of your application, and by increasing developer velocity you’ll be able to continue driving business performance. Adopting DevOps as a Service allows you to create the right environment for your developers and to encourage them to collaborate and contribute to the software development.

Grow your business

Adopting DevOps as a Service enables your organisation to continuously develop your application, allowing you to keep growing your business by extending your Product Lifecycle Curve. Leveraging DevOps as a Service will enable you to leverage new tools and processes so developers can react to the market quicker by having an effective way to release application patches and updates.

 

DevOps as a Service with Microsoft

With almost 70% of organisations already leveraging Microsoft Azure, it offers the easiest route to enabling a hybrid of full cloud environment for your business. Over the years Microsoft has invested heavily into making sure they’re able to offer developers the best possible toolset. Some of the tools you’ll be able to leverage to improve the way you build applications are:

• Azure boards
• Azure Pipelines
• Azure Repos
• Azure Test Plans
• Azure Artifacts
• Azure Marketplace
• Azure Pipelines
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Visual Studio
• Azure Monitor
• GitHub

You can learn more about what Microsoft DevOps tools has to offer on their website.

 

Are you looking to explore DevOps as a Service?

The benefits of adopting DevOps as a Service are endless and can help drive efficiency and innovation for your business. So, if you’re looking to start implementing DevOps as a Service, look no further. We’re a Microsoft DevOps, Application Development and Application Integration partner. In other words, there’s no better partner to have on your side.

Ready to find out how you can start adopting DevOps as a Service within your business? Simply get in touch to speak to our DevOps experts.

 

Sources
McKinsey & Company: Driving business outcomes through Developer Velocity 2020 and McKinsey Developer Velocity Survey, Expert Interview
McKinsey & Company: Driving business outcomes through Developer Velocity 2020 and McKinsey Developer Velocity Survey, Expert Interview

The truth is anyone can move to the cloud. However, building a well-structured Azure environment that’s optimised for your business can be tricky. That’s why Microsoft has created two best practice frameworks to support your organisation in getting to the cloud, and leveraging it once it’s there. These frameworks are known as the Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Well-Architected Framework.

If you’re looking to follow best practices for adopting and optimising Azure, then look no further. In this blog, we’ll be diving into what the Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Well-Architected Framework are, how they work together, and how you can put them to use.

 

Cloud Adoption Framework

The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a collection of proven documentation, implementation guidance, best practices, and tools from Microsoft designed to help businesses move to Azure with confidence. This framework should be used by businesses that are looking to migrate to Azure and want to create a highly optimised environment from the get-go.

There are six stages to the CAF, and each stage has been crafted to help you accelerate your cloud adoption journey. The six stages of the Cloud Adoption Framework are:

1. Strategy: Start by understanding your business objectives to identify how Azure can support them
2. Plan: Align your people, processes and technology to map your cloud migration plan
3. Ready: Prepare your environment and start deploying your first landing zone
4. Adopt: During this stage, you can either migrate your on-prem environment to the cloud or innovate your digital estate leveraging cloud-native technologies
5. Govern: Create benchmarks and implement a governance minimum variable product to help you stay on track
6. Manage: Monitor your environment through data collection and alerts to ensure you’re following best practices

Think of the CAF framework as your guide to navigating your cloud migration.

Learn more in our Beginners Guide to the Cloud Adoption Framework.

 

Azure Well-Architected Framework

The Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework provides technical guidance specifically at the workload level across five different pillars; cost optimisation, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence. Aligning to the Azure Well-Architected Framework will allow you to build highly optimised Azure infrastructure.

This framework should be used by businesses that are looking to optimise their cloud investment and ensure they’re aligning to best practices.

Think of the WAF framework as your guide to maximising your Azure investment. If you’re in Azure, there’s no excuse to not be following the WAF.

Learn more in our blog post, The Five Pillars of the Azure-Well Architected Framework.

 

So how do the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-Architected Framework work together?

These two frameworks can be used at various points of your cloud journey to help maximise your Azure investment. In short, the Azure Well-Architected Framework helps you optimise a specific Azure workload, and the Cloud Adoption Framework is your reference point for migrating to the cloud according to best practices.

If you’re new to the cloud, then you should begin by leveraging the Cloud Adoption Framework. The six stages Microsoft has identified are crucial to ensuring you have a successful migration. It’s important that you really focus on building an effective plan and strategy before migrating.

Once you’ve migrated or built an application in the cloud, it’s time to start looking at the Azure Well-Architected Framework. Microsoft carefully crafted these five pillars to guide you in creating optimised workloads in Azure.

If you’re already in Azure and want to explore how to continue your cloud journey, then check out our Assessments & Workshops page. Whether you’re looking to optimise your current cloud environment, strengthen your security practice, or look towards an AI future, we have the assessments and the expertise to light the way.

The Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework provides technical guidance specifically at the workload level across five different pillars; cost optimisation, security, reliability, performance efficiency and operational excellence. Aligning to the Azure Well-Architected Framework will allow you to follow Microsoft’s best practices.

So, you’re looking to learn more about the Azure Well-Architected Framework pillars? You’re in luck. In this blog, we will be explaining what the Azure Well-Architected Framework is and discussing each of its Five Pillars.

 

What is the Azure Well-Architected Framework?

The technology requirements of your business naturally change over time. Deploying business-critical applications can increase complexity and overheads substantially. To help manage this ever-growing complexity, Microsoft has created the Azure Well-Architected Framework, which follows strict industry guidelines to provide a set of Azure best practices.

The Azure Well-Architected Framework isn’t just for businesses that are looking to migrate to Azure. It can also be used by businesses who have already adopted the Microsoft Cloud and want to align their environment to best practices. Microsoft provides businesses with a Well-Architected Framework score to show how aligned you are to the best practices and areas you can improve concerning the five pillars.

 

The Five Pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework

The Azure Well-Architected Framework is made up of five pillars that outline industry best practices. The Five Pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework are:

• Cost management
• Performance efficiency
• Reliability
• Security
• Operational excellence

Each one of these pillars will enable your business to build a high quality, stable and efficient cloud architecture whilst having the ability to continuously optimise your workloads against Azure best practices. Ready to find out more? Let’s dive into what each of these five pillars involves.

 

Pillar one: Cost optimisation

The first pillar, and often the pillar most businesses are looking to optimise, is cost. When optimising costs, you should start by monitoring and analysing your Azure bill by setting budgets, pre-planning any Azure spend for teams, projects and future investments. But the optimisation doesn’t stop there. You should implement cost controls within your Azure Environment so your teams can work within the constraints of your spending policies and objectives. This allows you to manage costs and maximise the value you derive from Azure.

 

Pillar two: Performance efficiency

Your workloads must be able to scale to provide users with an optimal and cost-effective experience. Microsoft says that your performance efficiency should match application resource capacity to demand; enabling you to easily scale resources, identify & optimise bottlenecks, and optimise application code for peak performance. Optimising your Azure environment for performance efficiency will improve the ability of your system to adapt to changes in the workload.

 

Pillar three: Reliability

When using Azure, you want to design and operate mission-critical systems with confidence. The second pillar to the Azure Well-Architected Framework is reliability – which is a system’s ability to recover from failures and continue to function. You should start by defining availability and recovery requirements, then identify any possible failure points to determine how the application will respond to failure. You should then respond to failures by determining how best to address them based on established strategies.

 

Pillar four: Security

Azure is the cloud you can trust thanks to Microsoft’s investment of more than $1 billion in research and development by 3,500 security experts. However, secure workloads require more than a secure foundation. The third pillar of the Azure Well-Architected Framework is security. Microsoft says it’s important for you to consider your workload security as much as the platform you use. It’s important you leverage the tools, training and best practices available to help you not only detect but also respond to any security threats across your Azure environment.

 

Pillar five: Operation excellence

The final pillar in the Azure Well-Architected Framework is Operation Excellence. This involves the operations process that keeps applications running in production by implementing modern development practices like DevOps.  For deployments to be reliable, they should be automated to minimise any human error. Any automation you implement should be a quick and repeatable process to avoid slowing down the release of new features. Finally, to achieve operational excellence, you must use monitoring and diagnostics to give operational insights to your systems and solutions.

Sources: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/introducing-the-microsoft-azure-wellarchitected-framework/

 

Azure Well-Architected Framework Recommendations

Are you looking to align your business to the Azure Well-Architected Framework? We’re offering a personalised 10-minute video from one of our Azure Experts, who will highlight recommendations on how to align your Azure environment to the Azure Well-Architected Framework. Want to claim your free video? Simply follow the link below.