Which Is the Right Technology to Choose?
The most important step in choosing the right technology is to determine a direction
for your organization. Does your organization want to focus on the public cloud first
and have a minimal on-premises infrastructure? Is it investing in brand-new
datacenters and servers and looking to maximize that investment by focusing its on-
premises infrastructure? Or does it want to achieve best of breed with a hybrid
approach?
Having a direction is important, but it’s also critical to know your limits. By this I
mean, what can your organization realistically implement and support with its given
resources, including its budget? It’s doubtful that a 50-person company with a single
“IT guy” could operate a complete on-premises infrastructure and have the facilities,
resources, and budget to have its own disaster-recovery, off-site location. At this point,
the company has to evaluate where its IT resources should be focused, and for some
IT services, look at external solutions. A great example that I see a lot in the industry,
even for the very largest organizations, is using software as a service (SaaS) for email
and collaboration, such as the Microsoft Office 365 service. Messaging can be
complex. It’s considered a tier 1 application for many companies, which means that it
must always be available. Thus, rather than try to architect what can become complex
messaging solutions, it’s easier and more effective for organizations to outsource this.
Take the time to understand the types of IT services that your organization needs to
provide. Understand the data retention, backup, and compliance requirements and
regulations for your business. Understand the criticality of the system and the services
upon which it depends. Then look at your resources and what you can support,
because this will certainly help guide your direction. You may have services on
premises today that would be an appropriate fit for the cloud because contracts are
ending, hardware could be reused for other projects, and so on. Many organizations
today spend huge amounts of time, effort, and expense on applications and services
that consume way more than they should, especially in relation to their benefit to the
organization.
Microsoft also offers organizations something that strangely is fairly rare in today’s
solutions—a choice. Microsoft is a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant (explained at
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/research_mq.jsp) in many in many)
areas including x86 virtualization, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a
service (PaaS), allowing customers to choose how they deploy their solutions. The
actual solutions are different, depending on whether they are on-premises or public
cloud, which may mean rearchitecture if an organization changes its mind on how to
host the solutions at a later time.
With the introduction of Windows Server 2016 and Microsoft Azure Stack, this
scenario changes. Now an organization writes an application by using the Azure
Resource Manager model, and that application can run in the Azure public cloud, it