Tag: moving to the cloud

The Smart Play of Smart Managed Services

At a recent design and manufacturing conference, a question came up. “Is the industry ready to make use of new technologies?” The answer came back, a resounding no. Most companies have skipped the step of digitizing their existing processes, so they’re not ready for new digital inputs. Perhaps an excellent intermediary step would be to reimagine business as usual by partnering with a managed service provider (MSP).

Shifting to a managed services environment is a critical step for many businesses. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with wondering about your next best business decision, then you’re not alone.

Many companies haven’t figured out how to change themselves enough to grapple with legacy challenges, let alone how to solve new, more complex puzzles like digitizing operations. By having an MSP like IronOrbit, companies can take their time becoming more comfortable with the idea of digitizing. When companies are ready to digitize, they won’t need to do major surgery on their IT infrastructure or data architecture before they begin. Instead, they’ll have a reliable partner who can focus on providing the right technology at the right time.

The Growing Skills Gap

In January 2021, a McKinsey study found that  87% of companies worldwide are aware of a skills gap. Gaps in IT departments will become increasingly conspicuous as emerging technologies continue to get a foothold. In the digital age, companies need to move fast. Ongoing IT education is prohibitive for many organizations. Even if the financial resources are available, the process is too slow. There is a genuine need for businesses to move faster than before. Whatever they can do to enable their operations to be more transformative and innovative with their use of technology, the better off they’ll be for whatever happens next.

As soon as an IT, enterprise resource planning (ERP), or e-commerce business solution is down; an organization instantly loses profits. Efficiency and expertise are necessary for getting these solutions back up and running. Bracing for the storm of increasing demand and decreasing labor power, business leaders may feel stuck when making their next move. If this is the case, managed services could be a solution. Here are the factors to consider.

Bridge the Skills Gap

A recent Prudential survey reports that businesses that focus on continuously expanding employee skills have a tremendous advantage over those companies that don’t. When critical business technology goes down, companies can’t wait for internal IT teams to figure it out. Having a managed services partner like IronOrbit can efficiently solve the issue; moreover, a predictive analysis might prevent such disruptions in the first place.

Your Perfect IT Partner: Five Things

When considering a managed services partner to fit your business, there are five key characteristics to consider:

  1. Cost Savings – With IronOrbit’s managed services expertise and ability to efficiently solve IT challenges, you’ll notice significant cost savings by filling the skills gap and preventing extended downtime, lag issues, and recurring IT problems.
  2. An Increase in Productivity & Efficiency – Supporting your business and employees is IronOrbit’s reason for being. IronOrbit’s Managed Services free your internal IT, so they can focus on other priorities and increase your business’s efficiency.
  3. Quick Response Times – IronOrbit’s support staff is available when you need them so you can increase efficiency. IOCentral’s self-help automation tools make it fast and easy to open support tickets and check status around the clock, three hundred and twenty-five days a year. IronOrbit guarantees a consistent and reliable communication line to address urgent issues efficiently. Access to IronOrbit Resources and Specialized Expertise. IronOrbit service providers are certified professionals who have the expertise your business needs.
  4. An Extension of Your IT Department – With IronOrbit’s Managed Services, you’re not just getting a solid and secure IT infrastructure; you’re getting a partner who can liaise between your IT department and your ERP and e-commerce providers for the most effective solutions. Your team will have more time to spend on furthering business-critical activities than solving IT problems.
  5. Finding What Works for Your Business – IronOrbit has the expertise and innovative technology to best support you and your team regardless of the business needs. IronOrbit’s Smart Managed Services enables you and your teams to step away from any IT needs to focus on critical strategies for sustainable business growth. You’ll have more bandwidth to experiment and figure things out. Plus, you’ll have a technology partner ready to provide options for any challenge that may appear on the horizon. Companies face innumerable disruptive threats and risks. IronOrbit’s Smart Managed Services ensure smooth sailing for your IT environment now and in the future. We’ll be there whenever you’re ready to do more of anything, including digitize operations.

 

Please call us now at 888-753-5060 for a free no-obligation consultation.

Moving to the Cloud is an Essential Strategy for 2022

While not the magic bullet that solves all your operational problems, moving to the cloud forms the foundation of building a solid technology platform.

Businesses that took the opportunity to remake and future-proof their infrastructure and workforce during the pandemic will continue to pull ahead of the competition. As we move into 2022, it becomes imperative for companies to move to the cloud to accomplish two strategies:

  • Be agile and flexibly prepared for the unexpected
  • To Take advantage of emerging AI-enabled digital technologies

These two objectives mean large-scale changes to IT’s operating model. The more technology-savvy people in the company should take the lead in understanding what moving to the cloud would mean for the company. Target specific business areas and look at how having workflows on the cloud benefits operations through increased speed, flexibility, and scale, which are the standard hallmarks of having operations in a cloud environment.

Speed, Flexibility, & Scalability

If you want to deliver digital capabilities anywhere and everywhere, consider how the IronOrbit ecosystem uses the core capabilities of cloud computing to provide scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities. Our teams of engineers and business visionaries have taken the complexity out of migrating your environment to the cloud, so you benefit from faster time to value and reduced costs.

The improvements in productivity and efficiency can generate significant cost savings over time; however, the actual benefit delivery is optimizing IT functions. You’ll be doing things you’ve always done, but you’ll be doing them better, and your operations will be much more resistant to disruptions.

Introducing IOCentral

Our new automated self-service portal, IOCentral, delivers a fast and easy way to scale storage, networks, databases, and computer functionality. An intuitive interface allows you to scale business functions more quickly by connecting essential software and microservices. Using AI-enabled technology, IOCentral enables flexibility and comprehensive ecosystem management from one pane of glass.

Speed, flexibility, scalability, and reduced costs indeed represent long-term value, but those in and of themselves do not convey the urgency for moving to the cloud. For that, we need to look further ahead.

The Bigger Business Benefit of Moving to the Cloud

Taking full advantage of your move to the cloud means looking at the new possibilities available to your business because now your business is part of the global cloud ecosystem. The cloud now becomes a catalyst to build new capabilities and value propositions for your customers.

This larger prize focuses on building innovative practices, new sources of revenue, and learning from the unique knowledge flows that will inspire leadership, not IT, to create new digital value propositions for your customers.

Without the cloud, leadership will never be able to enter the competitive arena of 2022 and beyond, let alone have the possibility to innovate new products and services.

The Cloud Delivers All IT Services, Apps, and More.

 

Be ready to use new digital technologies and stay ahead of change. Call now for a proof-of-concept of how IronOrbit can prepare your business for sustained success.

Call us today at 888-753-5060

 

Migrating to the cloud, moving to the right cloud, Choose the right cloud service provider
AEC Firms Should Choose the Cloud That’s Right for Them

 

There has never been a time in business computing history when companies like yours have been more dependent upon the cloud. But what cloud? What kind of cloud?

Those questions matter.

Gartner’s October 28, 2020 report entitled, “Choose the Best Cloud Operations Delivery Model for Your Organization’s Needs,” highlighted an existing problem among cloud-dependent companies.

“Through 2023, 80% of large enterprise organizations that attempt to scale up cloud operations using traditional I&O (Infrastructure & Operations) silos will fail to meet customer expectations of cloud agility.”

What is at Stake for AEC Organizations?

Gartner points to four “negative impacts” that can result from cloud operations using traditional I&O.

·         Slow addition of capabilities

·         Challenge of managing costs

·         Lower reliability

·         Lesser stability

What Course Does the Gartner Report in Addressing This Potential Business Growth Harm?

As you dig into Gartner’s report, two main concepts become clear for the business owner.

1.      Cloud operations must evolve on-pace with your organization

2.      Speedy cloud implementation must be balanced with its ability to scale with your company.

Let’s take each of these concepts and break them down.

Your Cloud Operations Must Evolve On-pace With Your Organization

One of the irreversible changes that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the business world is a new enthusiasm for cloud-based workflow. Although MSPs and Cloud providers had been proclaiming the cloud’s business continuity benefits for years, many had not seen it in action until they had to send their workforce to work from home.

Some had to scramble and make use of less-than-ideal cloud solutions – just to survive the past year.

Others had invested in private cloud infrastructure to handle GPU-heavy workloads and facilitate remote work situations with ease.

Although details of our data centers and cloud designs are beyond the scope of this post, it’s important to know that not all “clouds” are created equal. The IronOrbit private cloud has been built with security baked into the process, using cutting-edge models that provide optimal performance for the heaviest of AEC workloads.

You Must Balance Speedy Cloud Implementation with the Cloud’s Ability to Scale with Your Company

Lightning-fast cloud adoption was one of the business technology decisions that had to be made by many companies under duress of the pandemic.

While not all businesses wanted to – or were able to – move all their processes to a cloud environment during the first COVID wave, the forced cloud adoption required on-the-spot cloud choices that may not have been the best fit for the company’s long-term strategy.

But it’s still happening.

Businesses without high-level IT guidance or a well-defined IT roadmap are jumping into cloud-hosted applications and public cloud solutions before realizing it’s not going to work with a long- term strategy. Use a cloud design not for where your company is at today, but for where your company wants to be tomorrow.

Unfortunately, many AEC companies have made a “giant leap” into cloud environments that were not designed to support the GPU work their firms do every day. Or it’s a cloud solution that doesn’t align with the long-term strategy. As a result, those companies experience frustrations. They don’t have the control they expected, or their remote work is hobbled because their applications are too slow.

The good news is that this leap into the wrong cloud is not irreversible. AEC firms can shift gears and partner with IronOrbit. Our GPU-Accelerated INFINITY Workspaces are purpose-built for the kind of data-heavy resource-hungry apps AEC firms work with daily.

The Cloud is Here to Stay

Gartner predicts that “by 2025, 80 percent of enterprises will migrate entirely away from on-premises data centers with the current trend of moving workloads to colocation, hosting and the cloud leading them to shut down their traditional data center.”

The pandemic put their prediction on fast-forward.

Experts assert that in many areas of society the pandemic has forced us to embrace 10 years of progress (for good or bad) in just one year. The “giant leap” into the cloud by many businesses that were not considering it in January 2020, is not going to be reversed. Nobody’s going back to on-premise servers.

Now that the end of COVID is in sight, your AEC firm can turn its attention to moving to the cloud infrastructure that best supports your work-from-anywhere, graphics-heavy workflow.

 

Want to know more about IronOrbit’s GPU-Accelerated INFINITY Workspaces? We’d welcome the opportunity to demonstrate its tremendous capabilities.

Discover for yourself why more and more AEC firms are choosing IronOrbit.  

Call 1-888-753-5060 now.

 

As businesses struggle to recovery, they need to create business strategies that are resilient and sustainable.
Harnessing the Power of the Cloud for Business Optimization

Because the world is more fluid, unpredictable, and less stable than ever, the cloud represents a resilient business strategy that is sustainable. 

 

Business optimization is the process of making your operations more efficient and cost-effective. Moving to the cloud enables these improvements to happen easily and with great flexibility.

For enterprise organizations, being in the cloud provides them with the ability to scale up their infrastructure quickly, without setting up an additional in-house hardware. It’s not only fast, but it reduces the cost associated with development.

Employees can access files using Smartphones, laptops, and tablets while you reduce operational costs, boost speed, and improve accuracy.

That’s just the beginning. But still, we’re just scratching the surface of what the transformational “supernova” known as the cloud can do for your business.

Moving to the cloud is not a cure-all solution that is going to solve all your optimization and business continuity challenges. Sure, there will be great benefit in simply migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud, but to fully benefit from this game-changing technology, leaders have to seek out the cloud solution that is optimized for their unique needs. Not all companies are created equal, and neither are clouds.

Cloud Optimization is about delivering business efficiency to your organization. Leaders need to target objectives, look towards future trends, and make predictions as best they can. These insights help IT operations make better cloud decisions and accelerate business innovations that will impact the future of your company. Remember, it’s not just a matter of surviving the years ahead. The goal is to thrive and, ideally, have the ability and wherewithal to shape your own future.

 

DID SOMEONE SAY, “BUSINESS CONTINUITY?”

It just so happens that being in the right cloud environment also ensures business continuity!

Let’s face it. There are many ways organizations can be disrupted.

There are natural disasters, service outages, security breaches, industry innovations/competition, and now, add lockdowns caused by pandemics to the list.

Without implementing a business continuity strategy as a part of an overall cybersecurity roadmap, any process optimization changes you make can be taken away from you in a second. By being in the cloud (instead of utilizing on-site servers to back up your data and host your applications), the cybersecurity and business continuity elements are already baked into your solution. This assurance of security and reliability gives you the freedom to customize and tweak your internal, IT-supported processes and innovate more effective ways to develop and deliver your products and services.

The decisions you make about your cloud infrastructure can determine the future of your company.

Imagine for a moment that you’re the CEO of one of the top three travel management companies in the USA. You’ve got more than 1,000 employees and twenty-plus locations scattered across the country.

But you’ve got a BIG problem.

The in-house infrastructure you implemented ten years ago is now out of date, operationally overloaded, and in urgent need of hardware, software, and security upgrades.

What to do?

Well, you could invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in new in-house hardware, software, and security solutions, or, you could start looking at the cloud as a potential game-changer for your growing enterprise.

That’s the choice that Darryl Hoover, CTO of Direct Travel, had to make.

He chose to use IronOrbit’s cloud infrastructure to help his organization take the next step in business optimization.

Darryl says, “Our success in the travel industry comes down to our ability to leverage technology and put it to work for our customers. IronOrbit helps us keep that competitive edge.”

 

Harnessing the Cloud for Business Optimization

5 Things You Need to Know

1. Know the Competition

It’s not a surprise that many companies are already using the cloud to house their data and infrastructure. Gartner, one of the industry’s leading think tanks, shows the numbers behind the massive move to a cloud-first infrastructure across all industries.

In an article titled Cloud Shift Impacts All IT Markets Christy Pettey of Gartner notes that “Gartner’s latest IT spending forecast shows that spending on data center systems is forecast to be $195 billion in 2019, but down to $190 billion through 2022. In contrast, spending on cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) will grow from $39.5 billion in 2019 to $63 billion through 2021.”

What do all these big-dollar forecasts mean for you?

Your competition is either considering a move to the cloud, or they’re already there.

 

2. Know the Costs

Cost is always a factor. Doing the math and understanding what cloud infrastructure will mean for your business optimization goals, in conjunction with your budgeting, is critical. Here are some factors related to cloud infrastructure costs.

OPEX vs. CAPEX – Cloud-first business optimization strategies allow you to get away from the life cycle (and break/fix cycle) of in-house IT infrastructure and move the IT budgeting from the CAPEX side of the ledger to the OPEX side.

Scaling Cost with Requirements – Although a company with infinite resources can afford to build IT capacity that they won’t use for 3 to 5 years, your company isn’t likely in that position. Cloud infrastructure allows you to utilize economies of scale and level-up your expenses only when your business process growth requires.

Budgeted Expenditures – Predictability is valuable. The cloud simplifies IT budgeting because all maintenance, updates, security, and upgrades are done by the cloud provider within a stable, monthly fee.

Improved Performance Raises Productivity and Lowers Costs – Improved efficiency and increased productivity have to be considered when it comes to the cost/benefit analysis of cloud infrastructure for business optimization. Profitability arises when employees can easily access their work without spending time on keeping their computers functioning and secure.

3. Know the Process

The unknown is everyone’s primary source of worry. When the IronOrbit team explains the cloud migration process to a business leader, he/she then has the clarity and information needed to make a decision about utilizing a cloud environment to improve business optimization.

This is how an enterprise cloud migration/implementation process works.

Consultation – Getting together with the key stakeholders in the client company to explore their goals for the cloud migration or implementation

Exploration – Digging in and getting a firm grasp on the current IT assets of the client company and the processes that those IT assets support

Collaboration – Working with the in-house IT organization of the client company to determine a roadmap for moving data and IT-supported processes into the cloud

Presentation – Submitting completed migration roadmap to client company leadership for review and approval

Implementation – Moving data and workflow in stages into the cloud in accordance with the roadmap that has been established and working in coordination with the client organization’s IT team

Testing and Quality Assurance – Ensuring that each stage of the migration process has been completed successfully and is achieving the desired/expected results, i.e., optimization of business processes

 

4. Know the Hurdles

Some companies try to tell you that moving enterprise systems from in-house IT assets to cloud infrastructure is a breeze, but they just aren’t telling you the truth. The fact is that enterprise IT assets are complicated. Moving them into the cloud is a complex procedure. That’s why it’s critical to choose the right team to handle the tough stuff and to help you get over the operational hurdles you must face before a cloud-first strategy results in business optimization.

Hurdle #1 – Buy In

Getting key stakeholders to get on board with a cloud implementation to achieve better business optimization is one of the first hurdles you will face. People like infrastructure that they can see and touch. As a result, there is an innate bias against cloud infrastructure – even if it is better on many levels than buying and maintaining in-house IT assets.

Hurdle #2 – Bandwidth

When your entire data and workflow are securely accessed through an internet connection, it’s critical that your business has reliable bandwidth to handle the traffic and a backup IP.

Hurdle #3 – Training

Optimizing business processes through the utilization of cloud assets is a game-changer. It’s important not to leave your staff in the dark. Each step of the process needs to be communicated from the top down. Talk to the employees that are most impacted by the change. Cloud implementation needs to be framed as a positive for the employees. They need to be trained on new aspects of the process that have been impacted by the cloud implementation.

 

5. Know the Benefits
Using cloud-based data sets, servers, and desktops, your organization can work to drive real-world business advantages.  Here are just a few examples of them.

The Benefits of Moving to the Cloud during Recovery

We’ve saved the best for last!

As mentioned in an earlier IronOrbit blog, the cloud has tremendous energy. The information travels up and down. Large amounts of digital information move in every direction. You need to learn to go with the knowledge flow if you’re going to thrive. The flow of knowledge stocks on the cloud will better equip you to look ahead, predict trends, and respond in a timely manner to the ever-changing market. Being in the cloud ensures that you are interconnected globally, where ideas and knowledge are exchanged freely.

It’s not just about knowledge flows, though that’s compelling enough. It’s also about being able to take advantage of leading-edge technology as it becomes available.

Consider the March 1, 2019, Deloitte article, CLOUD-BASED SERVICES ARE MAKING IT EASIER FOR COMPANIES TO USE AI. “These streamlined ways of using AI are coming at the right time as organizations recognize the value of investing in AI to improve their competitiveness. Companies without a great deal of AI expertise can still benefit, as user-friendly cloud services continue to improve and proliferate. The message for companies that want to remain competitive is that they need to jump in – and it’s never been easier or more essential to tap into the power of AI.

 

IN CONCLUSION

Business Optimization is achieved when gaps in process and technology challenges are addressed in relation to the resources available. Today’s business optimization isn’t about a one-time restructuring, but rather an ongoing, dynamic alignment of people, processes, and technology. This kind of strategic agility can only be supported adequately in a cloud infrastructure.  The Harvard Business Review article by Nicholas Bloom and Nicola Pierri, from August, 31, 2018, makes the point clear. “Flexible access to computing resources allows firms to scale-up (or down) rapidly and to experiment with new products and features. The operational agility can be particularly valuable when facing uncertain demand or a fast-evolving competitive environment.”

Another strong case for using cloud technology to optimize business is made earlier in the same article. It reports that cloud computing is an unusual technology that “provides high-powered computing without the overhead costs associated with in-house software and hardware provisions.”

 

THE BIG PICTURE

Here’s the most important question.

If you’re not going to utilize the cloud for continuous collaboration of processes to meet market demand and stay ahead of the competition, what are you going to do – and how much money are you going to have to spend to make it happen?