As more companies move towards the cloud and more of their data is stored off premises, Irish companies want their staff to be able to access it in a technology agnostic way.
“Mobile is becoming more important, and companies that have relied upon legacy technology like Windows Server 2003 are largely locked out of that. At the same time, technology refreshes are the perfect time to re-examine old traditional expenditure models,” said Marchetti.
“In the past we would see big bang spends every so often, maybe at five or six year intervals depending on expenditure. What we are seeing now is a fundamental change in how that happens. More and more companies are shifting to monthly payments to access the services they need and infrastructure as a service is something that we are seeing growing very aggressively. People are now beginning to think ‘why should we house a server on premise, pay for its powering, pay for its tooling and so on, when we can have it in a data centre?’,” he said.
According to Marchetti, there is so much physical power available to customers from data centres that those companies that have made that jump are beginning to realise that big data tools previously out of their reach are now accessible to them.
“They can start drilling down into the information that they are storing in much more coherent ways, extract that information and use it to make informed business decisions. That is something that we are seeing begin to come to the forefront of strategy.”
Simplifying infrastructure
According to Gerry Kerr, Microsoft practice director for Hibernia Evros, top of the wish list for companies using the Windows Server 2003 end of life deadline to reimagine their IT infrastructure is simplification.
“When we were going into customers to consult on this issue, we’d usually find lots of physical servers dotted around the place, sat there and switched on for the last 12 years and left alone because essentially the system worked. But being forced into a change meant that there was an opportunity to see if there were better ways of doing things,” he said.
“And simplification was and is a big driver — companies want to know ‘do we still need this server or could it be moved to Azure or AWS’ and ‘should this be housed elsewhere? Does this particular work unit need to be on premise and does it need to be physical in nature or could it be virtualised?’”
The consistent message was how is it possible to reduce the IT estate footprint? While the solution almost always involved moving some company assets into the cloud, Kerr said that he has still to see any major corporate go the full way.
“As of now, I haven’t seen any of our larger corporate customers going fully cloud based. They are opting for a hybrid model, looking at the workload and trying to find the right place for it, whether that’s on-premise, in a service provider cloud or with a big commercial global cloud offering.”
Sitting behind this urge to simplify and rationalise is the closely related urge to move as much of the company’s expenditure from CapEx to OpEx.
“The business wants to be able to flex up and flex down as it needs to. If you buy a whole load of hardware there’s no way you can flex down — you’ve paid the money so that’s it,” said Kerr.
Public cloud
“But if you go to a big public cloud offering then they’re designed to scale right up and right back down again. A great example of this in action is something like the airlines and their 24 hour sales. They’ve moved their web sites onto those sorts of offerings and the computing power they need to drive those sales is enormous — but they don’t have to keep it sitting around for a sale every three months. They can ramp up and down as they need to, and so only pay what they need to. That elasticity is enormously valuable and it’s what people are looking for.”
While small businesses are looking at this and seeking to move their server consumption into a hybrid cloud situation, they can gain from it in different ways than enterprise level customers, Kerr believes.
“For a start, these kind of services tend to come with disaster recovery built in. If the core of your computing requirements happen in the cloud then it will survive all but the most severe disasters. If your premises burns down then you can just log in at home. All your previous worries disappear into a single monthly payment.”
The other big driver is mobility.
“If you look at what Microsoft brought to the table with Server 2012 R2, which is what most people will replace Server 2003 with, things like Workspace Join, Direct Access, Work Folders — all of those service they’re offering are there to make it easy to enable mobile workers and to enable them to use their own devices. That’s a big and growing factor that we’re seeing in this area,” said Kerr.
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