New Signature’s Bryan Lloyd has worked with clients ranging from Citroen to Crossrail, HarperCollins to the Met Office.
The cloud migration specialist helps clients generate value by migrating services then developing custom applications on Microsoft Azure.
He sat down with Computer Business Review for a quick take on the importance of data centre modernisation.
Q: How can a modern data centre improve productivity?
In Azure, you don’t need to manage on-premise components like power, cooling, storage, virtualisation and backup so you become much more productive. It makes it a whole lot faster to deploy applications and data. That means that productivity increases and so does the value you can pull out of your data
Q: Are there any cost benefits to clients of moving data infrastructure to the cloud?
It’s an opex-only model, which is great: you only pay for what you use and certainly with Azure you can pay-per-minute. Scheduled shutdown of development and test environments out of hours can also help you save costs and it helps businesses avoid perennial infrastructure-refresh and core software upgrade costs.
Q: What are the compliance/security issues clients need to be aware of?
Azure data centres are heavily secured and comply with a number of industry certifications, however what you are responsible for is changes as you move from SaaS to PaaS to IaaS. From an IaaS perspective, what we do at New Signature is recommend additional security controls based on industry best practice and make sure they’re implemented.
Q: Much has been made of the need for business agility. How does data centre modernisation enable this?
In order to implement new applications in a legacy data centre, you typically need to take a large number of manual steps and potentially procure new computing power. When using Azure or a managed cloud service like it, you can use automation and an almost infinite amount of capacity to very quickly implement new applications and respond to business demand.
Q: How can cloud help speed up operational decision making?
As many of the legacy operational tasks are removed and customers start to use a cloud-based operating model, decision making is much faster as operational focus can be on business outcomes. Many legacy ITIL processes can be reinvented in a cloud operating model like service management meaning operational decision making is happening at a much greater pace. If you’re new to the world or planning a migration the wealth of opportunities it opens up can almost be daunting, there’s so much more you can do. That’s why it’s crucial to have a really experienced partner help you through the process.
