Building an effective and scalable cloud strategy

Manchester’s long-awaited Tech Week launched last month, and the M247 team were thrilled to be on-site and part of the action.

The event focused on improving connectivity and implementing cutting edge enterprise technologies and featured some of the region’s most loved institutions, community groups, and associations.

Manchester Central played host to several events including the biggest tech exhibition the region has ever seen, the Digital Transformaton Expo.

DTX finds and showcases the best digital transformation solutions, from the best brands. And we were honoured to not only have a presence at the show in the form of an exhibition stand, but to be asked to take part in a panel discussion on the cloud transformation stage.

M247’s Head of Technology, Greg Hudson joined Alina Timofeeva, Associate Partner at Oliver Wyman, and Neil Smithies, Head of Digital & IT Architecture at the Information Commissioners Office to discuss ‘Building an effective and scalable cloud strategy for the agile enterprise’.

For those of you who missed it, we compiled Greg’s key takeaways, including:

• Migrating from legacy to cloud
• Leveraging the right partner ecosystem
• Planning a cloud strategy

The benefits of cloud migration

The beauty of the cloud is you can do things at pace, you can experiment, if it’s not working you can adapt and refine, and it doesn’t cost the earth.

Cloud adoption can also happen very quickly and make a difference to a business in hours, not days, weeks, or months.

The pandemic and cloud technology

The pandemic has increased the number of businesses that are leveraging cloud technology, the agile enterprises today need to be able to make decisions quickly and adapt to market changes. Cloud offers that flexibility to ensure that as a business, you can make the right decision, make a change, turn around on a dime if you need to, and keep the business moving forward.

The cost of doing anything in the cloud can be expensive, so it’s important you get the right governance, and the right FinOps processes built around it.

What does that mean? It means if you don’t have a trusted partner you can work with doing this on your behalf you’ll often find a lot of wasted resources, time, and money.

Planning a cloud strategy

For businesses planning a cloud strategy, security, and connectivity should be front of mind.

Every business relies on connectivity nowadays. It’s a given, you need a reliable internet connection to provide the right level of access to your Cloud data and apps, and to offer the best possible service to your customers.

Security also shouldn’t be an afterthought, it pays to have strong defences in place. Everyone is a potential target, and even short outages can wreak havoc on IT systems. We’ve found the only effective way to mitigate DDoS is to deploy dedicated, proactive detection protocols designed to pick up and prevent these types of attack.

From a business perspective, it’s important to understand your own requirements.

Before you even think about technology, you need to consider the people and the processes and what that will lead to.

Leveraging the right partner ecosystem

When it comes to cloud optimization there are a lot of options available to solve business challenges, so it’s really important you find a partner that wants to understand what your business does, what makes it tick and most importantly what makes you profitable?

At M247 we have a versatile and diverse capability at our customer’s disposal to help guide them on that journey.

There are often influencing factors around data sovereignty, like GDPR access to data governance compliance cost, and you have to make sure whoever you partner with has a solid understanding of your business and all of the above to make sure they offer the right solution.

It’s a very, saturated market, there’s a lot of companies that specialise in one thing or another, but a complete lack of businesses that embody all of those skills.

M247 has the ability to stitch all of that together, and the reason we have that ability is because we’ve invested in our 5G enabled network. This means we can join the dots between applications and data.

What does that mean for our customers? Well, we can onboard our customers and take them on that cloud journey from start to finish. And as we evolve the customer we can offer the best advice to make sure their workload is in the right cloud, at the right time, at the right cost.

Migrating from legacy to cloud

There’s a transition period we’re seeing where you have highly skilled people that are specialised in a specific infrastructure that are trying to transition those skills to cloud-based capabilities.

That’s not an easy or quick thing to do.

We’ve gone through this at M247, and what we like to look for is people that absorb information, and are enthusiastic about learning new skills, because you never stop learning, especially when it comes to cloud.

Cloud, is moving at such a fast pace, you have to want to keep up with it, you have to enjoy it, and you have to work, live and breathe it. These are the people you need to find.

Unfortunately, finding these people is a big issue for businesses at the moment, there’s a massive shortage of skilled, tech talent across the board, and in my eyes there’s two solutions to that problem. Create and nurture talent, or outsource the role to a trusted partner to fill the gap.

My advice is to invest in your people because without the right people, you don’t have the right foundations to run your business effectively.

To discuss how M247 can support your cloud strategy and hybrid workplace with 247Unified, get in touch today.