In a rapidly evolving and competitive market, companies want to put their business first and offload concerns about their IT infrastructure. And IT departments want to focus solely on strategic IT tasks with higher added value for the business. Inetum-Realdolmen frees up customers to do just that by providing the perfect solution with managed services for infrastructure.
Public cloud: fundamentally different
"Over the years, our Managed Services have freed our customers from the time-consuming management of their data center infrastructure. No matter where: on-site, in our Rcloud data center or in the public cloud," says Delva. "But a public cloud like Azure is so fundamentally different from a traditional data center environment that you also have to provide a different, customized managed service. That's exactly what we're doing now."
The list of typical features and functions available in the public cloud is long and includes self-service, high availability, generally unlimited scalability, and elasticity. "Managed services have to take all that into account," stresses Delva. "For instance, Microsoft Azure's pay-per-use model makes it financially attractive to switch off specific systems at night. And the elasticity of the cloud allows you to constantly focus on having the right data center capacity." In theory, many possibilities are available, but in practice someone has to find out about them, use them and follow through. Unfortunately, this often goes sideways.
While the public cloud creates lots of additional opportunities, it also presents organizations with many additional challenges. The extreme flexibility of the public cloud inevitably introduces certain risks and hazards. Combined with the self-service option, this flexibility can lead to additional and even exorbitant costs. "If your governance isn't in order, you will literally get the bill from Azure," adds Delva. "You probably don't want to have someone run a test on a service that costs you 5,000 euros a month. And, to make matters worse, you forget to switch it off."
With Azure, you also have lots of options for managing security and compliance. "You can even secure the public cloud better than an on-site environment," stresses Delva. "But you have to do it right. If you don't, you could give the entire world access to your cloud environment and your business-critical data could end up on the street."
Agile and DevOps
The world has also changed significantly on a different front in recent years. In response to businesses requesting quicker time to market, development teams have switched from a waterfall methodology to an agile methodology. There they work in sprints of two to at most four weeks at a time, and deliver functionality at the end of each sprint.