Category: Business

Migrating applications to Microsoft Azure offers a range of benefits that can enhance performance, scalability, and overall efficiency. Here are several compelling reasons to consider making the move:

Scalability and Flexibility

• On-Demand Resources: Azure allows you to scale your applications up or down based on demand. This flexibility ensures you only pay for what you use, making it easier to handle traffic spikes without overprovisioning.

Global Reach

• Multiple Data Centers: Azure has a vast network of data centers around the world, enabling you to deploy applications closer to your users. This reduces latency and improves the overall user experience.

Enhanced Security

• Robust Security Features: Azure provides a comprehensive set of security tools and features, including encryption, identity management, and threat detection. Microsoft’s security expertise helps safeguard your applications and data.

Integration with Existing Tools

• Seamless Integration: Azure integrates well with Microsoft products and services, such as Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Power BI. This compatibility enhances productivity and streamlines workflows.

Cost Management

• Flexible Pricing Models: Azure offers various pricing options, including pay-as-you-go and reserved instances, allowing you to choose a model that fits your budget. This helps manage costs while ensuring access to powerful computing resources.

Support for Multiple Programming Languages and Frameworks

• Diverse Development Environment: Azure supports a wide range of programming languages, frameworks, and platforms, making it suitable for various development needs. This allows developers to use the tools they’re most comfortable with.

Advanced Analytics and AI Capabilities

• Built-In Analytics Tools: Azure provides access to powerful analytics and artificial intelligence services, enabling you to gain insights from your data and build intelligent applications without extensive infrastructure.

Reliable Backup and Disaster Recovery

• High Availability: Azure offers built-in backup and disaster recovery solutions to ensure business continuity. This reduces the risk of data loss and downtime, providing peace of mind for critical applications.

DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

• Streamlined Development Process: Azure supports DevOps practices with tools for automated testing, continuous integration, and deployment. This accelerates the development cycle and improves collaboration between development and operations teams.

Sustainability and Compliance

• Environmentally Friendly: Microsoft is committed to sustainability, with initiatives to reduce carbon emissions and operate data centers using renewable energy. Azure also complies with various regulatory standards, ensuring your applications meet necessary legal requirements.

Conclusion

Migrating your applications to Microsoft Azure can unlock significant benefits, from enhanced scalability and security to advanced analytics and cost management. By leveraging Azure’s comprehensive cloud capabilities, your organization can become more agile, improve operational efficiency, and focus on innovation while Microsoft manages the underlying infrastructure. As the cloud landscape continues to evolve, moving to Azure can position your business for long-term success.

For more information on Microsoft Azure, Contact SNP Technologies here.

DevOps is a cultural shift and a healthy collaboration between development and operations. There is no single DevOps tool, rather a set consisting of multiple tools that range from version control of source code to application life cycle management. With DevOps, siloed roles like development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security coordinate and collaborate seamlessly.Some of the ways DevOps has proven to increase application delivery and efficiency for our customers include:

Dev & Ops Collaboration:

Raise efficiency, quality, and speed through better development and operations collaboration.

Centralized Source Code Management:

Version control of application source code and multiple team members to work on application code development parallelly, branching strategies improve the team development efforts

Rapid Delivery:

Move to continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD) with the test, release, and deployment automation process.

Automate Infrastructure: 

Automate as many of your processes as you can through virtualization, and configuration management to add agility to your infrastructure.

Microservices & Containerization: 

Develop and change applications faster and easier by making development, test and production environments more consistent.

Cloud Migration: 

Migrate and deliver applications in the cloud with scalability, resilience, and security.

Visibility

Manage, track, and report end-to-end software delivery for all stakeholders.

Flexibility

Get access to existing toolsets and processes, along with future technologies to help you automate and orchestrate activities.

Security

Get a centralized repository for all security, standards, and compliance policies spanning across functions, tools, and platforms.

Unlimited Scalability

Scale as your business grows and get a single source for sharing control and visibility.

Extensibility

DevOps offers strong integration capabilities that allow easy integration between tools and automation platforms.
For more information on how DevOps can help improve your business’ performance, Contact SNP Technologies here.

Perform a Data Center Assessment

• Inventory and Classification: Begin by conducting a detailed inventory of existing workloads, understanding their dependencies, and classifying them based on their business criticality.
• Rationalization: Identify which workloads are suitable for migration to the cloud and which should remain on-premises. Consider factors like data sensitivity, compliance, and performance needs.

Establish Cloud Governance

• Governance Framework: Set up a governance framework for managing workloads across private and public cloud environments. This framework should address operations, regulatory compliance, security, and the management of mission-critical applications.
• Compliance & Regulatory Guidelines: Ensure that policies around data handling, privacy, and regulatory requirements are met, especially when migrating workloads to the cloud.

Create Stringent Guidelines and Policies

• Documented Policies: Develop clear guidelines for how applications and data should be migrated to either private or public clouds. This includes performance expectations, compliance needs, geographic restrictions, and business-critical application requirements.

Reassess Resources and Capabilities

• Resource Optimization: Hybrid cloud solutions provide new capabilities, so take this opportunity to assess how additional resources can address business needs without disrupting current operations. Look for efficiencies in both IT and business processes.

Monetization Opportunities

• Cost Efficiency: The hybrid cloud can lead to significant cost savings. Transition from a traditional CAPEX model (Capital Expenditure) to an OPEX (Operational Expenditure) model by leveraging on-demand cloud capacity, reducing the need for hardware investments.
• Evaluate Future Expenditures: As part of your hybrid strategy, analyze future capital expenditures and assess if cloud solutions can reduce or eliminate these costs.

Manpower Management

• Skill Requirements: A hybrid cloud environment demands specialized expertise. Consider whether to train existing staff or engage with third-party service providers who have experience in managing complex cloud infrastructures.
• Resource Planning: Ensure your team is equipped with the skills necessary to implement, manage, and maintain a hybrid cloud infrastructure, covering areas like compliance, storage, networking, and virtualization.

Implement Hybrid Cloud in Phases

• Gradual Migration: Avoid rushing the transition to hybrid cloud. Start with migrating a few less-critical applications or workloads and scale up as you gain confidence in the system’s performance and security. This iterative approach helps build trust among stakeholders, including management and users.
• Continuous Improvement: The flexible nature of hybrid cloud allows for ongoing refinement. Monitor performance and make adjustments as needed.

Using cloud solutions to enhance data center efficiency, performance, and availability is a strategic approach that many organizations are adopting. Here’s an overview of how cloud technologies can optimize these aspects:

Efficiency

• Resource Optimization:
  • Dynamic Scaling: Cloud services allow organizations to scale resources up or down based on demand, ensuring that they only pay for what they use. This prevents over-provisioning and underutilization of resources.
  • Automated Workloads: Automation tools in the cloud can manage routine tasks and workflows, freeing up IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Cost Management:
  • Pay-As-You-Go Model: Cloud providers offer flexible pricing structures, allowing organizations to reduce capital expenditures and convert fixed costs to variable costs, which can lead to significant savings.
• Energy Efficiency:
  • Optimized Data Centers: Cloud providers often operate energy-efficient data centers, utilizing advanced cooling and power management technologies. Organizations can benefit from lower energy consumption by offloading workloads to the cloud.

Performance

• High-Performance Computing (HPC):
  • Cloud platforms provide access to powerful computing resources that can handle intensive workloads, such as big data analytics, machine learning, and complex simulations, without the need for significant on-premises infrastructure.
• Global Reach:
  • Content Delivery Networks (CDN): Cloud providers offer CDNs to deliver content quickly to users around the globe, improving the performance of web applications and services.
• Load Balancing:
  • Cloud solutions can automatically distribute workloads across multiple servers, ensuring optimal performance and reducing the risk of bottlenecks during peak usage times.

Availability

• Redundancy and Reliability:
  • Multi-Region Deployments: Cloud services allow for the deployment of applications and data across multiple geographic regions. This ensures high availability and disaster recovery, as services can continue operating even if one region experiences issues.
• Automated Backups:
  • Cloud solutions often include automated backup features that regularly back up data, ensuring it can be restored quickly in case of loss or corruption.
• Monitoring and Alerts:
  • Cloud providers offer comprehensive monitoring tools that provide insights into performance and availability. Organizations can set up alerts for any anomalies, enabling quick responses to potential issues.

Conclusion

Leveraging cloud technologies significantly enhances data center efficiency, performance, and availability. By optimizing resource utilization, reducing costs, and improving reliability, organizations can create a more agile and resilient IT environment. This not only helps in maintaining operational continuity but also positions businesses to innovate and respond swiftly to market demands. As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation, integrating cloud solutions into their data center strategy will be essential for success.

To learn more about how you can increase your data center efficiency, Contact SNP Technologies here

On July 9, 2019, Microsoft will end support and security updates for SQL Server 2008 + 2008 R2. By that date, businesses using those systems will need to have migrated their operations to new software. That presents issues not only of cost and security but availability. It’s not like you can migrate during downtime anymore. The 24/7 nature of the modern IT organization demands that you transfer on the fly to minimize service interruptions.

SNP has put together a unique process to ensure your organization has a low-risk, high-availability move to your optimal successor system for SQL Server 2008 + 2008 R2. Beyond that, this process will give you a reliable and repeatable methodology for future upgrades that includes planning, technology implementation, and validation and training.

Two Migration Paths to the Modern Cloud:

1. Migrate SQL on-premises to Azure SQL Database Managed Instances (SQL DB MI): This option gives you an intelligent, fully-managed PaaS solution that provides near 100% compatibility with SQL Server on-premises. SQL MI provides built-in high-availability and disaster recovery capabilities plus intelligent performance features and the ability to scale on the fly. SQL MI also provides a version less experience that takes away the need for manual security patching and upgrades.

2. Migrate SQL on-premises to Azure SQL VM: This is an IaaS option that provides Extended Security Updates at no additional charge above the standard pricing for Azure Virtual Machines. For customers that migrate workloads to Azure Virtual Machines, we will offer Security Updates and Bulletins rated “Critical” for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2.  This route to modern migration also offers you:

• Three years of Extended Security Updates at no additional charge and the ability to upgrade to a newer version when ready
• Built-in monitoring of security and performance for hundreds to thousands of databases at scale
• The option to migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure with on-premises licenses
• Significant time and resource savings with hybrid capabilities

Whichever route you choose to the cloud, or if you have no digital transformation plan, we recommend you upgrade to the most current version of SQL Server. That way, even if you cannot meet the end of support deadline, you can buy Extended Security Updates to keep the remaining servers protected until you upgrade them. Otherwise, you can choose to move to Azure by opting to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild your workload or app. Or, you can upgrade on-premises to the latest version of Windows Server.

4 Ways to Migrate to Microsoft Azure:

• Rehost: Migrate 2008 and 2006 R2 workloads to Azure VM or Azure SQL Database MI (No code change required). This allows organizations to maintain existing versions and editions without paying for extended support. Microsoft is extending SQL Server 2008/2008R2 support through 2022 for servers migrated to Azure.
• Refactor, Rearchitect, or Rebuild: Innovate with Windows server containers and Azure SQL Database MI (From minimal change to new code required)
• Upgrade: Upgrade to Windows Server 2019 or SQL Server 2019 and get cloud and DevOps ready (potential code change required)
• Pay for Extended Support: Here the costs are exponentially higher than the other options listed above and can be short term focused.

 

For more details of information on how you can prepare for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 end of support, contact an SNP representative.