Why did Diaxion move into the cloud?

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Most organisations have been using Microsoft Office applications for many years and applications like Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint have traditionally always been installed on local servers in an on-premises data centre. As the use of cloud products continues to grow, so has the use of Microsoft’s Office 365. Some great features have been added since this cloud hosted Office suite was first introduced in 2011 and the product has quickly grown to be a serious competitor over on-premises based solutions. Specific standout features include;

  • Access your data from everywhere and on any device
  • Low on maintenance and automated updates (rolling release model)
  • Centralised management and control through a portal
  • Collaboration between software services to enhance efficiency between people and teams
  • Multi factor Authentication available for enhanced security
  • Included wizard based tools to assist in migrating your existing data
  • Cloud products like Office 365, Azure and AWS are certainly a hot topic and many customers are asking us if they should make the move into the cloud. There is no simple answer to this. In fact, the more you investigate the options, the more questions you will likely have. E.g. what infrastructure are you moving to the cloud, are you going for a hybrid cloud model or, what is your preferred cloud provider?

    Each organisation will have a unique set of requirements or business drivers and identifying them is key. Cost and benefits to your organisation are usually the critical drivers and a cost comparison and feature map between all options can help in making a decision.

    For the business to succeed a strategy must be developed and it must reflect the goals the business has for cloud adoption. With the rapidly evolving cloud services it is easy to get side tracked by all the available new features, a cloud strategy will keep you focused on the outcomes being sought and increase the likelihood of success.

    Our internal infrastructure and data centre lease came up for renewal. Which was an opportune time to reassess our current infrastructure design and optimise how business services were hosted and accessed. SharePoint, Skype for Business and Exchange are the primary services for us so moving to Office 365 was a very attractive option.

    Our test environment is also vital for our business. Not only for testing and development, but also to upskill staff and for demonstration purposes. It was important to find out if we could run everything in the cloud on Office 365 as it wouldn’t be very cost effective for us to run a hybrid model.
    We identified that the following requirements were of high importance to us:

  • Improve efficiency by reducing maintenance overhead
  • Retention of a test environment was critical
  • Saving Cost where possible
  • Improve security by implementing Multi Factor Authentication
  • On demand services used at all times with careful monitoring of consumption
  • We have assisted many customers to develop their cloud strategy projects using our proven approach, in fact we used it on ourselves and continue to refine and explore new ways to increase customers’ successful outcomes, a critical ability with cloud platforms that evolve so quickly.

    In our case a mixed cloud model was the ideal option and after a few weeks of planning, we have now successfully migrated our production workload into Office 365 and Azure while our test and demo environments are moved into Azure and AWS.

    We strive to be thought leaders in cloud services and keep our customers up to date with the fast-changing cloud environments with the many new feature releases. Making the move to the cloud in some form for our customers is now a certainty but the degree for each customer varies. By focusing on the business benefit and cost outcomes Diaxion can tailor a strategy that is right for each organisation and ensure true cloud benefits are insightful, agile and effective.

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