From increased agility to enhanced security capabilities, the benefits of a cloud-first strategy are becoming increasingly clear. But what may be less obvious is how to tap into those cloud advantages in the best way possible. Especially with multi-cloud architecture being a popular route for many enterprise IT leaders (81% of IT leaders report already having a multi-cloud strategy in the works), optimizing on-premises, private, and public cloud resources for maximum benefits can be a challenge.

As adoption rates rise, and more operations shift to the cloud, new questions are cropping up around management strategy. Which operations should be migrated—and how? How will data be safeguarded from the get-go, and into the future? What are best practices for cloud management and governance?

Moving to the Cloud Is Not Always the Answer

Pressure to leverage the cloud often comes from the C-Suite, external pressures, and departmental SaaS requests. And one of the biggest claims or expectations is the promise of cutting costs by moving to cloud. However, this isn’t always the case in reality for two key reasons:

1. Replacing CapEx on-premises infrastructure purchases with OpEx cloud bills does reduce initial capital expenditures cost. But the long-term costs of operating cloud services really depend on the specifics of the infrastructure that is provisioned. Depending on your capacity and performance expectations, the cloud isn’t always the cheaper option.

2. Some applications, data, and/or infrastructure may indeed be more secure, less expensive, and easier to manage through the cloud. But others may not be. You can’t put a price on security in a world where ransomware attacks increase on a daily basis.

Instead of top-down decision-making, choose a more flexible approach that looks to the cloud’s greatest advantages, and maps them to your specific needs. This mindset will generate the best decisions for your organization.

The Cloud and Business Agility: Scaling Up and Down

A better approach to assessing your cloud strategy is to consider the cloud’s business agility, which enables users to provision business applications, tools, and infrastructure in minutes.

Business Agility and the Cloud

Today’s business climate requires enterprise IT leaders to be ready for change at any moment. The dynamic hybrid workforce coupled with increasing ransomware concerns has led to an IT infrastructure footprint that spans the globe. IT teams are responsible for managing and securing incredibly complex applications, data, devices, and user needs, and agility is a requirement. Adopting a cloud-first strategy empowers IT leaders to be more flexible, scalable, and nimble than ever before.

Self-service and orchestration automation enable end users to deploy systems and applications without direct involvement of IT personnel. The cloud’s ability to scale up or scale down applications, data, and infrastructure, or experiment with new applications without long-term infrastructure investments, also help make a business more flexible and competitive. It is therefore not surprising that a growing number of enterprises are using cloud infrastructure for testing and development and are now expanding it for use in production environments.

Three Essential Questions for Your Cloud Strategy

So, when you are developing your plans for the cloud, you will need to think about your larger business strategy and the needs of your organization where IT is concerned. The following are three key considerations.

1. What should you migrate?
2. What will be the true cost of implementing your cloud strategy?
   
3. How will you keep your data storage and transmission secure?

Our consultants are experts in the design and migration of workloads for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

1. What should you migrate?

“Everything” is probably not the right answer. You will need to examine the different kinds of applications you use, including desktop, client server, Web, mobile, and legacy applications, taking into consideration their associated performance, security, scalability, integration, and portability concerns.

Other cloud migration considerations include:

• Application criticality: Are you considering migration for an application that is central to business functionality and user productivity?

• Compliance requirements: What security measures are required for the workload, and can you selected cloud provider meet your needs?

• High availability and disaster recovery: In the event of an outage, what expectations does your business have for recovery?

• Tools and monitoring needs: What visibility, control, and management capabilities do you want to retain for yourself and your team?

Bear in mind that you may underestimate the number of applications used by your organization, the levels of integration among them, and the performance impacts of local and/or remote data access by these applications. A thorough discovery and documentation process is essential to creating an informed cloud strategy and roadmap.

2. What will be the true cost of implementing your cloud strategy?

What is Cloud Governance?

Cloud governance refers to the critical steps of defining, monitoring, and auditing the guidelines, policies, and processes that surround your organization’s cloud presence. It’s a constantly-evolving job, and ongoing maintenance and evaluation are critical. Your cloud strategy must take security needs into account.

Cloud service costs include not just the subscription fees, but also the time and resources required to execute your strategy. Migration alone can be challenging, time-consuming, and costly. You will also need to maintain, monitor, and manage your environment. What this looks like will depend on your architecture: private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud. A governance strategy is essential, and you may also need to invest in staff training to optimize your evolving environment.

Right-sizing is another issue—and one that’s often overlooked. Just because your data center has ten servers for a particular business use, that does not mean you need ten servers with a cloud service. It is easier to scale out than in, so it’s important to assess your requirements carefully and start small. Furthermore, cloud services are constantly evolving. Without close management, you may miss opportunities to obtain greater value by changing providers.

3. How will you keep your data storage and transmission secure?

As the major cloud service providers have improved their security frameworks, security has become less of a perceived concern. However, human error can undermine the built-in protections. Despite the availability of security toolsets provided by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and others, many organizations fail to fully enforce best practices such as using encryption or automated password policies. So, it is critical to ask the right questions and build governance and monitoring into migration planning.

Assessing Your Cloud Strategy

Colorado Beach’s Cloud Strategy Assessment is focused on helping you identify and plan for your highest-priority applications and workloads. Our cloud architects help you identify the best candidate migration candidates and lead you through a proof-of-concept cloud migration and training, designed specifically for your technical team.

Depending on your industry, you may also need to ensure that your cloud security is compliant with HIPAA, PCI, SOX, and other data privacy regulations. Secure storage is not enough—consider how you will control the transmission of sensitive information across networks that you do not own. An advanced, comprehensive security approach will be required to secure authorized access, isolate data transmissions, and protect storage across your networks, devices, and various cloud services.

Leverage Expertise to Optimize Your Cloud Strategy

Whatever your cloud strategy becomes, the intricacies of each step run deep. To keep in-house teams focused on the big picture, many enterprises find value in partnering with a cloud services and operations provider. From evaluating applications and owning migration plans, to providing ongoing governance and security, the right service provider can provide with appropriate advice, reduce your risks, and ensure that your cloud strategy achieves your objectives.

Change is the only constant in life. One’s ability to adapt to those changes will determine your success in life.

— Ben Franklin

Today’s workplace is going through more shifts than ever before. Employees expect to be able to work securely from anywhere, on any device, with tools that enhance their work experience and their effectiveness.

Organizations addressing these challenges are turning to digital workplace technologies to create a seamless delivery of apps and data that work across multiple locations while maintaining the security of their endpoint devices.

So what’s continuing to drive change in 2022 and what technologies can help get you there? Through our work with organizations across different industries, here are the top 5 digital workplace trends we’re seeing this year that you should know more about.

Market Trend #1 – Remote & Hybrid Workers

Hybrid and remote work has become commonplace in most organizations. And this year, unprecedented levels of the workforce are remaining remote or shifting to permanent hybrid work environments.

According to Gartner, the number of remote workers will have doubled to over two-thirds of digital workers by 2023. Gartner also found that hybrid and remote employees are forcing organizations to move forward with digital business transformation plans by at least five years.

It’s critical that employees in this new work environment have the tools available that allow them to be as productive and collaborative as possible. Employees expect to be able to seamlessly work from home and on the go, with apps and devices that help them do their jobs effectively.

As business leaders adapt to these changes and move forward with their digital business transformation plans, they will need to look to modern workplace solutions to promote positive and productive employee experiences.

Market Trend #2 – Cost Optimization

According to Gartner, through 2024, remote workers will use at least four different device types for remote working, up from three devices in 2019.

Organizations are leaning into cost optimization and consolidation more than ever. Business leaders have major opportunities to reduce unnecessary IT spending as they pursue transformation initiatives.

We’re seeing countless organizations repurpose devices that were previously used on-site, for remote workers instead of purchasing new hardware. This is especially the case with contact center offices that are now fully remote. Since digital workplace solutions can be delivered anywhere and on any device, you can deliver the same desktop experience to employees on both new and repurposed hardware.

Another cost-optimization driver is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). According to Gartner, through 2024, remote workers will use at least four different device types for remote working, up from three devices in 2019. By leveraging BYOD strategies with digital workplace solutions, organizations can avoid upfront hardware purchases while maintaining secure networks and governance over employee desktops and mobile devices.

Colorado Beach and its partners can also help you drive the adoption of applications you already own, such as Microsoft 365, to minimize third-party license expenditures.

Market Trend #3 – The Distributed Enterprise

According to Gartner, by the end of 2023 three-quarters of organizations that pursue a distributed enterprise model will realize revenue growth 25% faster than their peers. In addition to remote and hybrid employees in organizations of all sizes, we’re seeing larger enterprises reproducing their central office into smaller remote sites and branch offices for hybrid work, to promote employee productivity.

Along with more distributed organizations come more geographically-dispersed endpoints. An effective enterprise digital workplace has an app and desktop delivery strategy that can efficiently scale to a large number of endpoints across remote sites and branch offices. Distributed enterprises should also have seamless operating system (O/S) deployments, such as on-demand Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrades across large numbers of endpoints, as part of this strategy.

Distributed enterprises must also have a way to secure these distributed endpoints. Wherever endpoint devices are connected, businesses should also ensure that these devices follow a defined level of compliance standards that align with business objectives and industry regulations. An effective digital workplace solution can help organizations implement identity and access management (IAM), security monitoring, and endpoint security across all devices.

Market Trend #4 – Cloud-Based Solutions

In the past, all IT infrastructure was located on-premises. Now, cloud-based applications are absolutely essential for businesses to function with employees working fully or partially from home and using multiple devices. We have seen a record number of companies migrating their business applications to the cloud and adopting cloud-native applications in the last two years and this trend is only going to continue.

A robust digital workplace solution can deliver cloud-based collaboration solutions, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco UCM Cloud, and Webex, to drive employee productivity. Our Modern Workplace can help you deliver these applications to end-user devices seamlessly through user environment management (UEM) capabilities.

Many organizations are also turning to desktops as a service (DaaS) in addition to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions as part of their digital workplace strategies. DaaS is cloud-based, fast to deploy and manage, enhances security capabilities, and lowers costs of ownership compared to traditional on-premises solutions.

Market Trend #5 – Providing Secure Access

Cybersecurity measures that were employed even just a year or two ago are no longer adequate in today’s workplace where remote and hybrid set-ups are common and security threats are more sophisticated than ever. Organizations need to rethink their approach to security in an effort to protect key assets and sensitive customer data across a variety of touchpoints.

Today’s digital workplace should include employee remote access to data from anywhere, whether fully-remote or through a branch office, over a secure network connection. However, employees in different locations often need different security measures than they did when everything was on the company’s VPN.

While VPNs are critical in countless use cases, Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) are preferred for establishing secure network connections to remote workers who are bringing their own devices. In today’s digital workplace, brokers are delivered using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) connections and they’re also part of broader Secure Access Server Edge (SASE) strategies that look at network and security transformation holistically.

A SASE integration into today’s digital workplace can provide secure and seamless connectivity to apps and data from any location. SASE can authenticate remote users and ensure device health before establishing a connection, and lets you easily scale up and down service levels, features, and connections to protect hybrid work and branch office connections from threats.

Embracing Digital Workplace Trends

In the IT world, change is inevitable and organizations that embrace digital workplace strategies are likely to realize cost savings, improved security, and an improved employee experience. However, an effective digital workplace isn’t just about having the right technology available to drive productivity. Digital workplaces must be tailored to the needs of each individual organization, from design through optimization, and take the organization’s processes and people into consideration.

Modern Workplace solutions can be fully customized to include user environment management, virtual desktops, operating system deployments, remote access, identity and access management, enterprise mobility management, monitoring, and endpoint security. With our dedicated expertise, we’ll customize a digital workplace solution that’s tailored to your needs and build your roadmap to success.

Ready to learn more about how you can leverage Modern Workplace solutions to boost employee productivity while deploying apps and desktops in record time? Contact us today!

Why do a formal assessment of your enterprise network?

Like a car, enterprise networks benefit from regular checkups. But too often, network assessments are left untouched at the bottom of the to-do list as daily urgencies pile up.

If left unchecked for too long, complex legacy systems can become a beast to manage and secure. They demand constant troubleshooting, with reactive tactics to smooth out operational bumps and fill critical security gaps.

When untamed, legacy systems also thwart the potential to implement the latest network technology trends, like SD-WAN, software defined access, and other automated solutions.

One simple way forward? Embark on a network assessment with a neutral, third-party partner you trust.

What is a network assessment?

A network assessment is an in-depth analysis of your current IT infrastructure that provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your existing environment and recommends improvements such as network consolidation, simplification, or automation.

When you engage a third-party partner to lead a network assessment, their objectivity is a benefit. With a fresh perspective, they can deliver unbiased recommendations to achieve improved capacity planning and performance. They can also help create a network infrastructure strategy aligned to your business goals.

Six key benefits of a rigorous network assessment

From greater agility to enhanced security, the benefits of a high-performance computing environment are easy to visualize. What can be harder to see is the value of taking a good, hard look at network health and laying out a clear road map for improvement. Following are the benefits of a serious network assessment:

1. See what’s going on with your IT infrastructure. An in-depth analysis of your current IT infrastructure—from topology maps to local traffic pattern analysis—can help ensure you’re making informed decisions about network maintenance and upgrades. Armed with accurate evaluations of current infrastructure assets, such as maintenance status, capabilities and weaknesses, your team can improve survivability of optimal systems, and phase out those that aren’t passing muster.
   
2. Create a strategic road map for your IT systems and people. After gaining visibility into the current state, your team can zero in on opportunities for network consolidation, simplification, automation and possible cost reduction. You’ll be able to move forward with a clear road map to a modern, software-defined and virtualized infrastructure.This frees up your team to focus on more strategic activities. Your IT employees will have the opportunity to transition from admins to engineers, working on value-added tasks without headaches from DR, backups, and administrative tasks.
   
3. Improve security.It’s difficult to defend against cyberattacks without full visibility into your network, including an understanding of how people, processes and other technologies interact with it. A strong network assessment uncovers those behaviors and interactions, empowering a proactive and preventative security strategy that protects against global threats as well as end-user vulnerabilities.
   
4. Uncover serious cost-savings potential. In a traditional, legacy computing environment, capacity is provisioned based on estimated peak resource requirements. This results in periods where expensive resources are sitting idle, and other periods where capacity is not enough. A network assessment opens the door to designing a new network architecture that includes cloud computing. In the cloud, you can access as much or as little capacity as you need and dynamically scale to meet actual demand, only paying for what you use.
   
5. Identify protocol enhancements like network segmentation. Assessments can expose vulnerabilities in your current operations—and, in turn, uncover opportunities for improvement. For instance, when users access data on a flat network, a data breach can spread quickly across the enterprise. Network segmentation reduces the attack surface, and can simplify your organization’s compliance reporting.  
   
6. Get C-suite support for improvements. With today’s enterprise leaders more invested in technology strategy than ever, a rigorous assessment can go a long way in making the case for the C-suite to sign off on meaningful upgrades. Strengthen your proposal for needed improvements by showing analytical data about how technical features will directly improve operations, support business goals and alleviate specific pain points.

Moving from assessment to opportunity

For enterprises seeking a hardened security posture, greater agility, and improved business results, a network assessment may be the big step forward that you need. Getting a handle on your current-state infrastructure and topology is only the beginning. Conducting a network assessment will give you the information you need to prioritize and pitch new investments in your enterprise. Your approach to new technology and projects will become data-driven and strategic, based on leveraging your current investments to their total potential.

If you’re ready to uncover new opportunity in your network, look first for partners who have specialization in the key areas you need, such as virtualization, networking and automation; and the expertise it takes to map out scalable, next-generation infrastructure.

In today’s business climate, most users expect data to be available instantly. Waiting for applications to open is not only an inconvenience—it can be a real drag on business performance. That’s one reason why all-flash arrays are becoming an increasingly popular enterprise storage solution. Flash memory offers faster data transfer and stronger performance than spinning hard disk drives.

Do you need an all-flash storage array upgrade?

Slow application performance can be a red flag indicating possible storage upgrade is needed. Watch out for departmental delay issues, or end user complaints. It all depends on the workload.

All-flash arrays can solve some problems in certain IT environments—but not necessarily all. Some points of caution:

• All-flash storage arrays are generally too expensive to suit all needs. Hybrid arrays, combining flash memory and hard disk drives, are still viable for most environments.
• You’ll derive the most value from an all-flash array that is purpose-built for a performance-intensive workload, like Oracle or SQL databases.
• Your bottleneck may have less to do with storage than you think. In my experience, the storage system causes app-data gaps only about 40 percent of the time. Network issues and CPU exhaustion are also common culprits. There’s no point in investing in all-flash arrays if the bottleneck is being caused by something else.

Once you’ve identified the performance issues you want to solve, it’s time to dig deeper into the all-flash array features available.

5 considerations when evaluating all-flash array vendors

How do you choose an ultra-high-performance solution that’s right for your environment? Many worthy options are available, such as Nimble Storage, which offers great ease of use, and integrates well with hybrid arrays; PureStorage, a powerful, cost-effective product; and XtremeIO, with high performance and the cost to match.

Keep the following factors top of mind when choosing from today’s all-flash-array vendors:

1. Throughput. Flash can handle countless input/output operations per second (IOPS)—but throughput is equally critical. Throughput is measured by the number of data bits read or written per second. So, you’ll need to understand how much throughput your workloads actually need to know whether and what kind of a flash drive is the best storage solution.
2. Read-Write Ratio. How will write amplification (WA) affect performance when data changes? Since solid state storage cells must be erased before they can be written over, data and metadata are written multiple times—and a flash drive accepts only a finite number of write cycles before it fails. You’ll need the read-write ratio that best aligns with actual workload.
3. Block Size. Can your all-flash array storage handle different block sizes without impacting performance? A vendor may claim a high IOPS rate—but the rate is based on a 4KB block size. Look at the actual block sizes required by your workloads to obtain a more realistic idea of an all-flash array’s performance.
4. Feature Management. In some cases, certain features won’t always support best performance. For example, many all-flash array products have deduplication and data compression capabilities, but using these features will slow performance. And, not all applications or data types need deduplication or compression. Understanding how these features work will be critical to balancing write amplification and performance.
5. Longevity. Performance will naturally change as an all-flash array drive fills up—it’s inevitable with any solid state drive. What is the vendor’s strategy to remediate inherent performance issues over time? Understand when you will need to consider upgrades, and also look for the product’s ability to scale.

Compare features, strategy, and trends before you make your decision

Many all-flash array vendors offer a feature checklist that will address these items. Make sure you look beyond their checklist to understand how the features will support your unique applications and workloads. Be sure to compare the best options, carefully considering read/write ratios, performance levels, and capacity—then document what you learn.

You’ll also want to consider your bigger picture backup and disaster recovery strategy. Do the all-flash array vendor capabilities meet the technology requirements in your business continuity plan.

And lastly: take into account industry trends and innovation. Your vendor should have an eye on industry trends for storage and data management and an answer for how they relate to their product road map.

For more about all-flash arrays, contact our team today.