How workplace IT can leverage cloud services to transform your organisation into a thriving modern workplace.

The Great Migrations.

Some of the early cloud adopters took a provisional approach of “minimal change” – migrating their existing IT estate into cloud by “Lift & Shift” existing Virtual Machines [VMs] as-is into right size VMs in cloud. 

The drive behind this approach? Limited impact on business-as-usual operations, minimal time to be up and running in cloud, and utilising existing on-premises licenses.

Many of the other companies followed suit and this early lock-in gave cloud providers the advantage of bringing the customer into cloud while creating various opportunities for them.

Minimal change is really no change

However, these migrations have their own drawbacks. 

• The VMs need to be maintained, upgraded, patched and security hardened just the way, on premise. 
• The planned maintenance window needs all due considerations of availability and downtime the way it used to be on-premises. 
• Any security vulnerabilities must be addressed urgently if on public cloud, even for less utilised or limited-use VMs. 
• Any new resources added, or any extensions to existing network, can have larger implications which were limited compared to the on-premises network. 

Essentially, these migrations have become simply a change in data centre location rather than able to leverage many of the cloud innovations and services. Those migrations do not reduce the volume of work of your current IT, nor make it more efficient, as many of the existing practices on-premises are yet same or similar.

Welcome to Cloud Migrations 2.0

Companies who have primary estate invested in VMs in cloud, should look beyond to move into cloud providers’ platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, rather than staying on VMs.

There is a plethora of PaaS or SaaS services from

• Cloud Providers for Hosting services
• Cloud Providers Platform services
• Services Providers services

Within Azure Cloud, some examples of services are:

Compute Services

• Azure App Services
  • AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service)
  • Azure Functions

Database Services

• Azure Relational Database – SQL Azure, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle
  • Azure NOSQL – Cosmos Db, MongoDb
  • Azure Caching – Reddis Cache

Platform Services

• Azure Monitoring & Logging
• Azure Vault – Key & Secret Management
• Azure Storage

Similarly, AWS and GCP have number of such hosting and other platform services.

Other SaaS providers like ServiceNow, who has a SaaS version available in cloud and monitoring platform Zabbix also offers similar SaaS service, to name a few.

Essentially if you have ten different VMs for various services, there is a chance that 4-6 of those can be migrated to PaaS or SaaS service in some shape or form. Which means – the IT team is freed from operational management of VMs along with licensing and securing such VM infrastructure. i.e. – one less thing to worry about.

What’s in it for the modern workplace?

By migrating these VMs into PaaS/SaaS services, we are turning legacy IT into Modern Workplace IT by spending less time on management of VMs and more time on

• Tooling – automation tools like IaaC terraform or such
• Tooling – Various Cloud based tools offerings
• Designing tools like Visio or such maintaining the networking and other infrastructure designs
• PaaS/SaaS service configurations
• Explore ways of incorporating GenAI based tools supporting IT function

And most importantly spending time on Security Aspects of Cloud infrastructure, like

• Creating the right security posture for the entire IT organization across regions and sites
• Optimising and mutualising security tools and services are optimised & mutualised with one eye on cost 
• Enabling all Users with multi factor authentication
• Creating the right policies across various IT functions as per their requirements e.g.
  • Compliance configuration
  • Preferred Services configuration
  • Setting VM sizes for various departments (only upon approval remember first preference is PaaS/SaaS)
• Configuring Security Monitoring and adopting to modern tools for threat monitoring, modelling based on Gen AI
• Setting up the Cloud Operating model with right level of Autonomy and Control

Migrating into cloud and maintaining is hard. However, done right, you can reap benefits focussing only on the aspects of Modern Workplace IT far more than legacy practices.

With the efficiencies and streamlined management that Cloud Services approach provides and with DevSecOps thinning the boundaries between Development & Operations, the IT operations can collaborate with internal dev teams to share these efficiencies. Based on these efficiencies and other factors looming, the dev teams can adopt Cloud Centric Applications approach of Cloud Native development more rapidly.

Are you ready to embark on 2.0? Sogeti can help

Leveraging our industry knowledge and leadership in technology, solution development, and integration, we align and build upon our Cloud partners’ innovations with your specific business needs. So that you can sit back and let Sogeti do the heavy lifting.

Get in touch to learn more about our client’s cloud transformation journeys and how they have made a difference to cloud adoptions.