Cloud

Since Microsoft are making Office365 so attractive to buyers, then why not take advantage of the rich functionality and ubiquitous access available through this advanced collaboration platform. However, migrations to O365 needn't take 12 months or more. The experts at Lumen IT use tools and professional services specialists to fast-track your migration so you can benefit from the functionality in the platform sooner.

Whilst moving a VM from an on-premise platform to the cloud sounds easy (aka "lift and shift"), many organisations have suddenly realised that this will never deliver the touted cost savings of the cloud. The best approach for migration (and to achieve these savings) is to re-architect the application using cloud-friendly "micro-services" that allow optimisation of the consumed services. This optimisation is the catalyst for significant cost reduction.

A workload transition to the cloud can be achieved using tools that will orchestrate the data movement in a managed way. Lumen IT offer a range of solutions such as backup solutions (Commvault, Veeam) or data archival and management (such as Spectra Logic StorCycle) which are designed for managing workloads that feature long-term data preservation requirements.

With such high levels of virtualisation deployed in our clients today, virtual machines (VMs) make the dream of DR a reality through the advanced portability of these server workloads.

Through continuous replication of VM content to the cloud, should a disaster event be declared, replicated workloads can be restored and spun up into operational VMs ready to take over production workloads, quickly and robustly.

With so many organisations deploying workloads to the cloud, either through SaaS (eg NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Office365 etc), or IaaS (VMs in the cloud), it means that all eggs are in one basket.

Best practice will recommend a backup out of the cloud, back to premise or to another cloud provider to ensure that the traditional backup practices ingrained into our expertise are mirrored in a cloud environment.

Moving workloads to the cloud just because it is trendy will usually inflict more devastation than open-heart surgery on your IT environment. By default it will be costly, and often will never deliver the touted cost savings espoused by vendors and unwitting CIOs. Lumen IT offers tools that will identify significant cost savings within cloud deployments that will pay for themselves in benefits that will continue year after year.