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A whitepaper from Brennan ITbrennanit.com.au

DRIVING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH HYBRID TECHNOLOGIES How Brennan IT can help Australian businesses adopt new up and coming hybrid technologies that drive their business goals by improving their IT environment.

A whitepaper from Brennan ITbrennanit.com.au

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1. Understanding your business

2. Applying solutions to your challenges

3. Road mapping your technology future

In this whitepaper, we elaborate on each of these steps and outline our recommendations for how your businesses can successfully evolve your technology to gain an all-important competitive advantage.

At Brennan IT, we are continuously helping Australian businesses on their digital transformation journey by adopting a three-stage strategic approach.

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Why it’s important

Today, it’s increasingly common for businesses to be operating with a complex IT environment; managing a very broad collection of on-premise and cloud-based resources. This can include everything from on-premise server infrastructure, to cloud-based apps, telephony, end user computing, networking devices.

In fact, according to a recent customer survey, 65% of organisations believe that a hybrid IT infrastructure contributes to cost savings, and 61% of organisations say they would intentionally choose a hybrid environment if starting from scratch.

However, as technology continues to evolve, the task of managing and monitoring this ever-expanding and often disparate hybrid IT environment is becoming increasingly complex and difficult. Your people and clients expect your IT to be available around the clock, users expect a seamless user experience, and any downtime or security breach could have a major impact.

At Brennan IT, we have extensive experience in managing hybrid IT environments. We understand and apply the many benefits of cloud-based ways of working; yet also appreciate the crucial importance of keeping some infrastructure and applications on-premise. We believe an ideal environment should include a range of hardware, software, tools, applications and platforms – but with an overarching, consolidated focus.

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How it works:A digital transformation journey

In a nutshell, we work with our clients to Discover what the business is looking to achieve in the long term. Next, we validate those requirements and Align them to our Managed Hybrid IT model.

We then Share that review with the client to clarify there is alignment between client expectation and the recommendation, before Execution. Once the solution is in place, we wrap our Managed Service around it and conduct regular Reviews to ensure ongoing performance.

Discover Initial business discovery session with your organisation’s C-level executives aimed at educating ourselves on your business and what makes your organization a successful enterprise.

Execute During the execution stage we work hand-in -hand with your vendors and internal IT department to deliver a complete end-to -end solution.

Manage We wrap our award-winning Managed Service around your new Hybrid environment, to ensure you get as much as possible form your solution, well in to the future.

Align Having validated your business requirements, we compare them against our managed Hybrid IT model and address any misalignments.

SharePrior to commencing your digital transformation journey to Brennan IT Managed Hybrid IT we ensure our solution is aligned to your expectations.

Review Our quarterly strategic business reviews are led by one of our Principal Consultants and are aimed at providing your technology team with a holistic view over the entire IT environment, on a regular basis.

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Your business

At Brennan IT, we start every project by focusing, in detail, on understanding our clients’ unique predicaments and needs.

Based on a study conducted by Gartner in January 2018, digital transformation is a top priority for business and technology leaders over the next 12-24 months. To achieve this, they seek ways to transform the entire digital value chain, from the front-end customer experience to the back-end management of complex Hybrid-IT environments.

With proven experience in delivering business technology solutions to the Australian mid-market sector, Brennan IT engages with key stakeholders in your organisation to offer a strategic approach to your Hybrid-IT transformation journey.

Based on hundreds of strategic engagements with organisations seeking to embark on the digital transformation journey with our Hybrid-IT offering, we’ve found that:

• Hybrid strategies need to recognise IT as an essential part of the business

Different platforms are necessary to support different business needs. For mobility, staff need to be able to connect to the cloud, but for governance you need to retain complete ownership of your data. Your hybrid strategy should help achieve business goals, as an integral part of the enterprise.

• Many firms end up with Hybrid IT by accident – not design.

Don’t make the same mistake others have by adopting hybrid it by accident. Build your hybrid IT strategy first, then implement it.

While the cloud offers convenience and flexibility, it may not offer the level of security or compliance your business needs, and it can be hard, and costly, to retrieve cloud-based data when needed. A hybrid environment can also be hard to scale and secure, and it’s difficult to put effective disaster recovery systems in place.

YOUR BUSINESS OUR UNDERSTANDING

Organisations across the public and private sectors can drive digital transformation success with the correctly-formulated application of modern hybrid cloud and IT infrastructure.

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Our understanding

At Brennan IT we understand that organisations rarely share the same vision, drivers, objective and pain points, nor measures for success.

As such, we have developed an engagement framework aimed at matching your business requirements to our Managed Hybrid IT service.

We use GAP analysis as a tool to assess strategic objectives, analyse challenges, identify any deficiencies and recommend a high-level action plan for a technology transformation. This may include new selling strategies, creating a competitive advantage, and crucial productivity and efficiency benefits.

We also determine how your organisation wants to attract and retain staff in the future, along with organising supplier and client relationships, achieving full compliance and security, and ensuring the greatest possible return on the technology investment.

Typically, we help our clients create a vision that will enable key benefits. When leading architectural design business Architectus came to us, they were looking at technology to help build growth, optimise processes and improve resource sharing, whilst keeping a consistency across all areas of the business.

Using GAP analysis, we translated those strategic goals into actionable programs and initiatives, such as migration to cloud, consolidating all systems into one Unified Communication solution and creating an IT Service Continuity Plan.

As an architectural design studio with over 350 stakeholders across Australia and New Zealand, we rely on efficient technology to manage a lot of continually moving parts. Communication, collaboration and compliance are essential to our success as a company. Brennan IT are helping us bring our systems into alignment, providing a technology roadmap to build upon unified foundations well into the future.

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– George Panos, CFO. Architectus

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At Brennan IT, we start every project by focusing, in detail, on understanding our clients’ unique predicaments and needs. This includes examining appetite for risk and for change; growth and performance issues; infrastructure set-up; and any current technology limitations. We also consider any staff issues, client experience and supplier issues.

Once the challenges are recognised, our consultants help design a comprehensive strategy from the ground up, where all existing processes and technologies form part of the overall Hybrid solution.

While based on proven processes, our recommendations are always entirely customised to suit each client’s unique needs, and designed to deliver maximum value.

Your challenges

Often, IT departments implement a variety of Hybrid IT initiatives hoping that these will have the necessary flexibility and scalability to handle increasingly complex environments where workloads can live anywhere.

Unfortunately, however, reality rarely meets expectation: pervasive technology, process and even people challenges often cause these initiatives to stall.

In addition to the usual security and budget challenges enterprises often face, IT professionals must solve a host of issues to make their hybrid IT strategies work.

These include:

• Technology challenges: such as integration with legacy systems, overall management of the Hybrid IT environment

• Compliance challenges: there is often a dearth of knowledge regarding the compliance requirements each business must adhere to

• Business challenges: moving too fast or too slow for the business, a lack of communication between IT and C-level execs or even insufficient staff training.

YOUR CHALLENGES OUR SOLUTION

Our Hybrid IT solution is tailor-made to suit your business requirements.

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Our solution

With the exponential pace of change in IT, it makes more sense than ever before to use Managed IT Services. Maintaining a disparate and diverse infrastructure can be incredibly difficult. Faced with a complicated mix of solutions, devices, refresh cycles and management processes, IT staff can spend much their time simply keeping things running.

An extra set of hands – whether on-site or via remote support – is often the solution. Brennan IT takes a holistic approach to your IT environment, applying our deep expertise across the full ICT spectrum to improve system availability and performance.

With a Managed Hybrid IT service from Brennan IT, you can function more productively and effectively, using a tailored combination of IT that’s most ideally suited to the unique needs of your business.

• By 2020, 90% of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.

• Demand for traditional data centre outsourcing is shrinking. Worldwide spend is expected to decline from $55.1 billion in 2016 to $45.2 billion in 2020.

• Spending on colocation and hosting will increase, from $53.9 billion in 2016 to $74.5 billion in 2020.

• Storage as a service will increase from $1.7 billion in 2016 to 2.7 billion in 2020.

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Hyperconverged technology

Saving up to 90% capacity on storage and backup, hyperconverged infrastructure is a new way to reduce your costs and better align enterprise IT with business needs. At its most basic, it is the aggregate of the servers and storage devices that comprise the data centre.

Private cloud (iaas)

With IaaS, you can leave all your IT set up and ongoing management – including the purchase of servers, cloud set-up, software licenses, network equipment and data centre space – to the expert team at Brennan IT. We also provide round-the-clock consultative advice and technical support.

Public cloud

If you’re moving your current IT infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure cloud, the team at Brennan IT can help. We will provide expert advice on transitioning to Azure, and can procure and bill your usage at the same cost as going directly to Microsoft. We can also provide ongoing management of your new cloud-based infrastructure.

Colocation

Colocation allows you to place your servers in a rack in our Tier 3 data centres located in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne with high bandwidth connectivity to your private network and the internet. Our services provide 24/7 monitoring and technical support. Plus, all clients are provided with “remote” hands access to their equipment. Technical services such as data storage, backup, network security options are also available, as are cloud-based backup and data recovery.

On-premise infrastructure management

We don’t believe everything belongs in the cloud. In fact, many of our customers prefer to keep some or all of their infrastructure on-premise. Either way, Brennan IT offer a consistent experience in managing that environment – both on-premise and in the cloud.

We are one of the few Managed Service Providers still offering on-site / presence support, as well as remote support services.

Brennan IT Managed Hybrid IT

Hyperconverged Technology

Private Cloud(laaS) Public Cloud Colocation On-premise

infrastructure

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Most organisations are still reluctant to introduce technology strategic planning due to the misconception that they cannot afford spending the time to do it. However, the reality is that, without a long-term plan, they are likely to end up with patch-up or temporary solutions, or worse – the wrong solution. This could end up costing more time and money in the long run.

The adoption of our recommended approach to technologies and solutions provides a clear direction that will support your business for the years to come, and most importantly understand and address any current limitations, pain points or areas of weakness that are hindering the growth of your business.

In our experience, businesses who leverage Hybrid-IT to add further strategic value to their organisation, have been able to:

• Replace legacy tools, better organize resources for Hybrid and refocus their business vision/direction.

• Improve control, reliability and speed, while reducing complexity

• Reap more rewards from their technology ecosystem

Furthermore, while engaging with organisations at a strategic level, we’ve witnessed managed Hybrid IT environments bring critical benefits such as:

• Improved reliability and redundancy

• Reduced infrastructure complexity

• Clearer understanding of ROI

• Gaining competitive edge over traditional competitors

• Meeting and exceeding customer expectations

Your futureWhat is your business mission/vision?

In today’s economy, businesses face an uncertain future and look for governance when adopting new technologies such as Hybrid IT.

At Brennan IT, we don’t just stop at providing Managed Hybrid IT. We engage at a strategic level for the entire organisation by looking at the whole environment and how we can integrate a whole solution, both now and into the future.

Our roadmapMore than a provider. A business partner!

Our value-driven engagement model is driven by flexibility and collaboration, with the goal of building long-term partnerships.

We wrap our award-winning Managed Service around your new hybrid environment, to ensure you get as much as possible from your solution, well into the future.

Our quarterly strategic business reviews are led by one of our principal Consultants and are aimed at providing your technology team with a holistic view over the entire IT environment, on a regular basis.

Leverage hybrid technologies to add strategic value to your organisation

YOUR FUTURE OUR ROADMAP

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CONCLUSION

Why choose Brennan IT to manage your hybrid it environment?

Brennan IT are a leading managed service provider to the Australian mid-market, having been ranked number one for 9 consecutive years.

We have 20 years’ experience in delivering managed services around cloud, IT and communications environment, and understand that when managing a hybrid IT environment, all elements need to work seamlessly and fluidly. If one element is performing sub-optimally, it can very quickly have a flow-on effect – impacting your business’ performance, productivity and even customer service.

Unless your entire infrastructure is optimised and managed in the best way possible, it can be unnecessarily expensive, and the risk of downtime can be significant.

As more companies are operating on a Hybrid IT environment, outsourcing the management of the service is becoming an increasingly popular solution. Brennan IT is considered a leading company in architecting and deploying Hybrid IT, partnering with key vendors in the market to provide a seamless solution end to end.

Should you choose to manage your Hybrid environment in-house, Brennan IT can also provide ad-hoc support through hourly bundles of Service Packs. This means you can have an engineer on-hand, to help out when resources are stretched internally. The Service Packs are only pay-for-what-you-use and are useful when companies are going through staff changes and may have unfilled roles on the team. We can also be engaged to provide round the clock support.

The Project Services team are also available for clients to use as additional support when going through a major migration. In that scenario, the project is assigned an experienced project manager who drives an outcome as per pre-defined budget and timeframes.

To find out more,

contact Brennan IT on 1300 500 000 or visit brennanit.com.au

Author: Cristian Gruber, Principal Consultant

A whitepaper from Brennan ITbrennanit.com.au