Fordway Blog

Congratulations for reading beyond the title! No-one finds business processes very exciting (except perhaps ITIL experts such as our own Neville Armstrong) but they’re key to business success and getting your in-house processes aligned with those of your chosen cloud provider is a vital aspect of moving applications to public cloud.

Most organisations moving services to cloud over the next few years will find themselves managing a hybrid solution - a mix of in-house, third party and public  cloud services. This means they’ll need to find an integrated way to manage their cloud portfolio, because every supplier will claim ‘it’s not my fault” when a problem arises, and they could waste a good deal of time tracking down the culprit.

For most organisations the question is no longer whether to adopt cloud but when and what services to move, while early adopters should be reviewing their portfolio to make sure they are getting best value. For both groups, these are the key trends to look out for.

Richard Blanford explains Fordway's unique approach to being a cloud provider and integrator and how we deliver value for customers.

With the online portal which handles the majority of its consent and regulatory activities becoming increasingly unresponsive, the Oil and Gas Authority needed a new secure hosting environment. After a competitive tender it chose managed cloud provider Fordway, which now hosts the portal and provides back-up and DR using its own equipment in two UK data centres. Fordway also set up and hosts a remote desktop environment to run business-critical applications which could not be supported internally and enables new applications to be added rapidly to meet user demands.

To meet the need to reduce costs while protecting front line services, Chiltern and South Bucks District Councils agreed to work together to implement a shared services initiative. They chose Fordway to design and implement a new IT infrastructure to support the initiative using a shared platform to streamline service provision across the two councils while enabling each to maintain its own identity.

The thought of moving some of your applications to the cloud may fill you with relief - limitless capacity, almost total flexibility, regular monthly costs and a lot less infrastructure to maintain. However, before you start planning how you'll use the extra free time you'll no doubt get now someone else is looking after things for you, make sure you know what you've signed up for!