TOP FOUR CLOUD MANAGEMENT CHALLENGESand How to Overcome Them

CLOUD MANAGEMENTTHE LANDSCAPE HAS CHANGED

Microsoft Azure Security and Management With cloud computing’s continued upward trajectory, managers in charge of cloud infrastructure are faced with a multitude of tasks — cost management, governance, security, and more.

Security Industry leading

security with advanced threat

protectionGovernance

Proactive policy application and

optimized Cloud spend

Resiliency High availability and protection for VMs,

apps, and data

Monitoring Deep operational insights with rich

intelligence

Automation Powerful scripting, configuration, and

update management

Microsoft Azure

As companies move to the Cloud, a modern approach to management of cloud resources is required. No matter the industry, the blistering pace of technology means that you are competing on a new playing field — a realm in which companies who have adapted to a digital transformation mindset are thriving. These organizations are quickly changing the way their companies are run and how they interface with their customers, creating a data-first game plan that’s enabled by cloud-centric technology and a cloud-first culture. But the primary advantages of this sweeping technological shift brings a host of challenges. It can’t be a rinse and repeat of your on-premises solutions. You need to move away from conventional processes, unlocking and deploying the amazing power of the Cloud and your data. Managed Cloud can get you there thanks to its advantages — data can be managed on demand, you can get applications to market quickly, and scale up or down to meet your needs.

Armed with the power of Microsoft Azure, your cloud management challenges turn into a new world of opportunity.

There is no alternative to digital transformation. Visionary companies will carve out new strategic options for themselves—those that don’t adapt, will fail.

— Roland Berger

1

MANAGED SERVICES HAVE CHANGEDThe Cloud has revolutionized the way managed services providers work with customers. Traditional managed services providers were like an outsourced contract, which involved owning and managing a huge amount of capital requirement for the infrastructure. These contracts are essentially designed to manage the risk of deploying new capital in those environments. Thanks to the Cloud, the economics of this has dramatically changed. There is no longer a need for a lot of capital to deploy the infrastructure. Now, the focus is on mitigating the competitive risk by providing improved responsiveness, improved speed, and innovation. This allows a customer’s scarce human capital to focus on data and applications, not the maintenance and operation of infrastructure.

Modern managed services will help your company: • Align people, process, and technology and take advantage of what

the Cloud offers.

• Combine organizational agility (lean and agile teams) and technical agility (the ability to change infrastructure, data, and processes quickly) to move faster, better, and smarter.

• Leverage streamlined teams and processes to focus on what it does best — a shift that will move your company closer to becoming an industry disruptor.

Combining Organizational Agility and Technical Agility enables organizations to reach the upper-right quadrant, becoming industry disruptors. Comprehensive Managed Services, which help identify opportunities and risks, enables companies to continue their digital transformation into the Cloud.

Comprehensive Managed Services — to help you identify your opportunities and risks — is how you continue your digital transformation into the Cloud.

2

WHAT DOESCLOUD MANAGEMENT LOOK LIKE FOR YOU TODAY?

MONITORING & AUTOMATION

Inconsistent monitoring approach for IaaS, PaaS, and Containers

Unmaintainable code and silos of automation

Inconsistent manual configuration

Lack of full stack monitoring and visibility

MANAGEMENT & OPTIMIZATION

Tools used inconsistently across the organization

Difficult to understand why spend is increasing

Challenges gathering and analyzing data to support better insight and improve outcomes

Feeling of less control and more risk

Challenges finding balance between speed and control

Lack of security built into the development process Diverse set of

practices across business units

GOVERNANCE

Complex, manual change management processes

Lack of policy to enforce audit rules to ensure compliance

3

THE CHALLENGESThe Cloud is key to helping your business stay current, but you can’t just implement it and leave it alone. It requires constant management to ensure that you’re not missing anything, whether it’s the latest updates or addressing potential security concerns. However, there are challenges associated with cloud management.

These include:

PACE OF CHANGE Staying up to date with the constantly changing Cloud

SERVICE MANAGEMENT Transforming IT operations to support the dynamic nature of the Cloud

COST MANAGEMENT Avoiding potentially costly cloud sprawl with careful cost management

GOVERNANCE Governing the usage of the Cloud and its resources

How do you overcome these potential challenges to take advantage of the advances the Cloud provides? A top-notch cloud management service. Let’s look at each challenge individually to help you understand the way that a cloud management partner can help you.

Key customer trends driving new Cloud management & security needs

• MODERNIZATION — Spend is reduced with application and cloud modernization

• SCALE — Increased cloud adoption is driving the need to be better organized and governed

• SECURITY — The Cloud is now perceived as an asset in fighting evolving threats

• TRANSFORMATION — IT is transforming to play a more strategic role

4

1. PACE OF CHANGEAzure’s pace of innovation is faster than ever. Every year, Azure’s services get deeper and wider — new functionality and enhancements are being released all the time. Consider the following three points:

Are your teams struggling to keep up with Azure’s updates and new functionality? Change and innovation makes Azure more powerful, but it also increases its complexity. Inexperience with this new technology can lead to misconfigurations, not to mention potentially costly errors.

Here’s the thing — you don’t have to be solely responsible for keeping up with Azure’s increasing innovation. Why not leverage managed services to mitigate your company’s risk?

Azure Updates increased 118% in 2018 versus 2017 (up to 819 from 375).

There were 140 important product announcements and roadmap updates at Microsoft Ignite 2018, Microsoft’s Annual Tech Conference.

There are 161 unique Azure services — and it’s growing!

118% 140 161

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.— Leon C. Megginson

5

2. SERVICE MANAGEMENTService Management must digitally transform as businesses adopt Cloud in an effort to obtain greater innovation, increased agility, and decreased costs. For IT to be a success, it must remove its self-imposed barriers and support business success through digital transformation.

Cloud-based systems enable companies to remove silos, obsessively increase customer visibility and understanding to improve service, and increase efficiency through automation, not to mention employ effective knowledge management. Organizations moving workloads to the Cloud have several choices when making that move: Extend their current processes, procedures, and manual efforts into the Cloud or modernize and change the game. Being a game changer means leveraging “cloud-born” approaches, controls, tools, capabilities, and services that are simply not available or even feasible on-premises.

Modern Service Management is the key. By undergoing digital transformation and, by extension, modernizing service management, IT transforms itself from a cost center to a value center. Microsoft Services came up with a perspective called Modern Service Management, which is: “A lens intended to focus service management experts, around the globe, on the most important outcomes that evolve our customers from legacy, traditional IT models to an easier, more efficient, cost effective, and agile service structure.” Service management isn’t an add-on — it’s a built-in part of our managed services model.

The IT organization and the CIO are at center stage in creating a solid foundation for digital business at scale — which demands better consumer engagement, faster delivery of digital ‘products,’ and a secure information and technology foundation to build them on.

— Andy Rowsell-Jones, Distinguished Vice President Analyst, Gartner Research & Advisory Office of the CIO

6

3. COST MANAGEMENTFor many companies, managing cloud costs has become a huge problem. These organizations are often unaware of how much money they are wasting. True cost management is one of the most significant benefits of a cloud environment, but most businesses still face the monumental challenge of truly managing costs — to pinpoint where waste is occurring and how to eliminate it on an ongoing basis. Yes, moving to the Cloud is transformational, but with this comes the challenge of “cloud sprawl.” This sprawl is the uncontrolled proliferation of an organization’s cloud instances, services, or providers. Cloud sprawl typically occurs when an organization lacks visibility into or control over its cloud computing resources.

Capabilities to combat cloud sprawl and reduce costs include: • Purchasing Reserved Instances (RIs) and keeping them optimized• Continuously identifying unused infrastructure• Rightsizing underutilized infrastructure• Turning off non-production environments when not in use

The best way to mitigate cloud sprawl is to manage cloud use. Organizations should start by establishing clear user policies and ensuring ongoing communication between business departments. Additionally, organizations should monitor and enforce their cloud computing policies by using cloud management tools. Cloud Managed Services provides this as a core part of their services.

Cloud users are increasingly concerned about the money they might be wasting in their public cloud spending, but only a small percentage of them are doing something about it.— Charles Babcock, Information Week

7

4. GOVERNANCEEffective cloud governance is extremely important, but many companies have not created a carefully considered approach. All the benefits of the Cloud, such as flexibility, lowered cost, and speed, also open up the door for security concerns. The Cloud has lowered the barrier for consuming services; this poses a significant problem for companies that shift to this model. Challenges include resource usage, cost, access issues, data privacy, and more. Cloud providers offer some tools that can help you effectively manage governance, but to truly have a handle on compliance and security, you need more. Customers, challenged with technical and organizational worries, often have a range of concerns. Do we have embedded management and operational controls? Are metrics for measuring performance and risk in place? What are our security vulnerabilities and what is their business impact? And, are we progressively reducing security risks to acceptable levels?

And, without effective governance in a quickly changing cloud environment, you risk things getting out of control. With cloud security governance, you want strategic alignment, value delivery, risk mitigation, effective use of resources, and sustained performance. You need this but without it there’s no possible way for your teams to keep up. In fact, we place such a priority on governance, we ensured that it’s part of our managed services model. Managed services is the answer.

The best way to think about governance is as a series of automated guardrails, in the form of policies, that keep you from running off a curvy road.— David Linthicum, InfoWorld

8

INCREASE YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGETransitioning your business to the Cloud isn’t as simple as it sounds. Ensuring that you’re staying abreast of the latest updates, managing the services, making sure that the related costs don’t skyrocket, and maintaining strict governance is a lot to handle for anyone, let alone someone with a lack of experience and a full plate. Is it time to make the switch to Cloud? If so, you need to do it right. Today’s managed services are very different than they used to be. Now, managed services brings with it a multitude of benefits, but you really need a cloud custodian to help you get the most from the Cloud. After all, Azure is powerful — but only if you understand its full capabilities. Cloud computing is a better way to run your business. And managed services is the best way to get the most from the Cloud. Look to a managed services provider that can manage your infrastructure and provide a security and well managed Cloud, resulting in innovation with an integrated modern platform and agile services structure.

Focus and InnovateAllow internal resources to

do what they do best

Manage RiskPrevent downtime with

continuous monitoring

Reduce SpendSave 10-30% through

Cloud optimization

Increase SecurityMaintain a secure and

well-managed Cloud

Go FasterUnderstand Cloud performance

and usage

When you have the right partner by your side, I am confident you will be able to deliver your desired business outcomes and keep pace with all of the innovation that the cloud enables.— Corey Sanders, Corp Vice President,

Microsoft Azure Compute

9

With Azure Managed Services:

OUR MANAGED SERVICES

24/7 US-Based Support We’re here for you. When you call us, there is a person on the other end of the line. Right away. And that person is an experienced full-time member of the 10M Managed Services team based in Tulsa, OK who has the distinct job of serving you. No phone lag time; no localization. Rest easy knowing you’ll have a Tier 1 Incident Management single point of contact, Tier 2 Specialized Support, and Tier 3/4 Escalation.

Proactive Approach Get more than simply incident solution service. We’re proactive on your behalf, keeping a close eye on your environment and systems. Get proactive governance, monitoring, and security escalation for infrastructure, application, and platform issues. Our Managed Services team is always thinking through solutions on your behalf for your continued long-term success.

Award-Winning Service Born in the CloudWe were born in the cloud. We are cloud experts, and our core focus is making sure our clients get the most from their cloud initiatives. Our experience and Azure-centric approach have led to several awards, including the 2018 Microsoft US Apps and Infrastructure – Datacenter Transformation Partner award and Global Open Source Applications and Infrastructure on Azure Partner of the Year award.

Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP)We’re proud to be named an Expert MSP for Microsoft Azure. What does this mean for you? It assures you that we have an expansive knowledge of Microsoft Azure, are abreast of the most recent updates, and meet a strict set of requirements set forth by Microsoft. Expert MSPs must also complete a progress audit every year, so as Azure evolves, you can trust that 10th Magnitude is evolving with it.

Imagine what we can do together.

info@10thMagnitude.com | 10thMagnitude.com/Managed-Services