Considering Microsoft Azure for your public cloud solution?

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Published 05-Jun-2017 11:41:40
Considering Microsoft Azure for your public cloud solution?
 

There are plenty of websites independent of Microsoft which list the business benefits of choosing Azure as your cloud solution.

Put your Microsoft cloud infrastructure to work

We don’t intend to go over everything at length again here – let it suffice to say that Microsoft Azure is without doubt reliable, secure, scalable, performant and compliant, and that at Vohkus we’re more than happy to recommend it to our customers.

However, that recommendation does come with a qualification. You need to understand Azure’s capabilities and use them to the fullest extent you can if you want to get the highest return on your investment. Sure, with Azure – as with any major cloud provider – you don’t need to invest in physical servers and storage, and knowing that you don’t need to worry about things like disaster recovery as a result of system failure is highly reassuring.

Azure’s security and multi-factor authentication features are also attractive, and are likely to exceed the standards of most traditional on-premises data systems. Microsoft’s invested too much and has too much at stake for its systems not to be robust.

But if you’re approaching Azure from a data centre operations perspective, you might notice a few things missing. They’re the system housekeeping functions, like domain administration, system software installation, operating system updates, and patch management. So if you’re looking to make operational savings by diverting your staff onto more valuable projects, you may find they’re still too tied up keeping your Azure lights on.

Economy of scale

Just as buying Azure virtual machines helps reduce the comparable overall cost of data centre hardware for everyone, so it’s equally possible to spread the load when it comes to system management.

Imagine if you had Azure experts on hand 24x7 to make sure your implementation was constantly tweaked and tuned, updated and optimised, and provisioned to your specification every time you had to ramp up capacity. It’s simply not practical for most organisations to throw that level of resource at their own solution. But by pooling these requirements, it’s possible to achieve the same ends using a managed service.

The result is assured Quality of Service against service level agreements that many organisations would struggle to meet with just internal resource. But that’s not all. Because amanaged service is billed on a subscription basis, it’s far easier to control costs and ensure transparency. The entire environment can therefore be managed as one through the opex budget.

Introducing Meggha managed Azure public cloud

At Vohkus we’ve been managing data centres, networks and desktop environments for years – sometimes remotely, sometimes as part of an on-site arrangement. As cloud has grown in importance we’ve found ourselves involved in public, private and hybrid deployments too.

We decided to put this experience to work by setting up a cloud services business called Meggha. And one of the first things we did with it was to capitalise on our Microsoft Gold Server Platform Partner status by working with it to create a range of Azure managed services.

While you can buy ‘vanilla’ Azure through us, we think the real benefits lie in a full managed service arrangement. That way you get simple, consolidated, transparent billing, much better visibility of your investment over the long term, a 24x7 service desk, and guaranteed service levels that leave your IT staff free to concentrate on strategic projects that will bring increased business value.

Resource consumption is measured on an hourly basis, so you only ever pay for actual capacity used plus ongoing management.

Wherever you are on your journey to Azure, we can help

If you’re already using Azure but it’s not delivering against your expectations, we can help. If you’re considering a move to Azure – as part of a full public cloud or a hybrid strategy – you can call on our experience of helping many similar migrations. And if you simply need to spin up resource for a short-term project we can advise on and manage your solution.

Meggha provides additional Azure-based services too. For example, you might want an enhanced Backup-as-a-Service or a virtual firewall. Meggha can also help you get on top of access control by helping to build a business case for rationalising your IAM and providing a consistent method of user identification across cloud and on-premises applications using Azure Active Directory.

We’re highly experienced at carrying out Office 365 migrations and managing those environments too, which means that Meggha is able to offer an O365-based ‘Productivity and Collaboration-as-a-Service’ (PCaaS) solution that enables consistent and flexible information sharing within customer offices and on the move. It includes capabilities such as messaging, email, conferencing, and document management – all billed on a monthly basis.

All Meggha solutions adhere to enterprise-level standards even where budgets are limited. And with Meggha taking end-to-end ownership of the environment you can be confident there’s a single source of ownership with no arguments for any issues that arise.

Whatever you’re planning for your Azure deployment, you owe it to your business to find out what Meggha can help you achieve.

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virtualisation meggha cloud infrastructure Microsoft Azure public cloud data centre