In 2018, that meant a new focus on understanding the needs of customers in specific industries.
We hired industry experts to better meet the regulatory, IT governance and operational needs needed in financial services, federal, state and local government, healthcare and retail to help develop solutions to their specific business challenges.
When we create these solutions, we find that these industries also face a number of common challenges. These include decisions about when, how, and how much it will cost to leave local data centers; choosing, migrating, and managing multiple clouds; and how to better protect and utilize ever-growing data stores.
Exiting the Data Center
By 2025, about 80 percent of enterprises will have closed their traditional data centers, Among the necessary buildings, hardware, software and security controls, data centers are a significant capital investment. While this could have been the “admission price” for most companies, there are now more agile infrastructure options available to customers.
However, the transition out of the data center can be difficult to plan, time-consuming to run, and can overburden internal IT teams. Our best practice approach to getting out of the data center was developed from extensive experience with thousands of implementations across all industries.
We meet with you where you are conducting assessments, help you design your future state and then plan, coordinate and execute the migration, and protect your final state environment.
Moving from the data center leads to the next common challenge…
Migrating to the Cloud
Despite the well-known advantages of elasticity, scalability, security and cost-effectiveness, the challenges associated with the cloud adoption process remain a major concern for many of our customers.
Determining application readiness, identifying the ideal platforms on which to run them, and monitoring the ever-changing cloud services and features require careful planning.
These challenges are so frequent that traditional managed service providers have not been able to keep up. The next-generation managed service provider, which focuses on customer needs and pain points to create a tailored, multi-cloud solution that offers the best fit for each application.
IT Outsourcing
Internal management of IT tools and services may seem like an easy way to save money, but as businesses grow and technologies evolve, continuing to manage, redesign, and integrate complex infrastructures can create costly problems for businesses.
Workforce management and training requirements to maintain a comprehensive IT team, while still focusing on innovation, can become prohibitive.
Partnering with a next-generation provider like provides access to certified experts who have managed all aspects of the customer’s IT solutions, from application support to organizing automated processes and implementing continuous security. As an added benefit, vendors that meet specific compliance standards allow you to outsource some of your regulatory liabilities.
Control IT spending
Customers in all industries are looking for cost-cutting opportunities to help prevent their IT spend from destroying profits or reducing core business expenses. It’s difficult to balance the need to reduce IT costs without cutting specialized resources and affecting customer service.
Designed to meet this challenge, has designed cost optimization services. Services include function resource tagging, budgeting services, and expense reporting. We proactively identify inactive, unused, misaligned, out-of-date resources and fix them as needed. This allows organizations to spend smarter, focusing IT dollars on formula.
Application Modernization
Another common pain is the need for support from multiple providers and multiple clouds. Our customers have told us loud and clear: I want to take my applications to the cloud; I want to use what I have and what I know.
No one wants to be forced to change the tools they have been using to run their business just because they are not compatible with a specific platform. What they want is the ability to run current applications in a new environment.
Finding out which applications need to be re-factorized or readjusted, and which can work best as a service, requires the integrated effort of a diverse army of experts. Has the resources, not to mention partnerships with key vendors, to migrate and deploy each and every application for optimal performance.
Data protection and storage
No list of common challenges would be complete without discussing data and storage security. While we see some industry diversity between specific storage and security regulatory standards, customers are consistent in their commitment to protect their mission-critical data, personally identifiable information, and intellectual property.
Help implement controls and processes and educate internal teams to understand the leverage they have to maintain control. We know the stakes are high: data theft can destroy reputation and businesses. That’s why security approach is to integrate it into all levels of your solution at all stages of its lifecycle.