Published in Housing Technology, May 2021
One of the questions we’re frequently asked by clients considering their WAN architecture is whether to use SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) rather than MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)? The answer is: “it depends”.
Like most organisations within the public sector, housing associations (HAs) are moving towards a “cloud first” strategy as a way to better engage their tenants via digital services, whilst driving productivity and keeping costs down. Cloud also gives them the flexibility to adapt quickly – which is vital in this sector, where government changes to how housing benefit is paid, for example, require a rapid response from the IT department.
Azure can bring the benefits of productivity, agility and decreased costs to your organisation, but like many things, realising the dream relies upon the preparation before you take the leap. Learn how to rehost and refactor for the cloud.
Today’s move on cloud is the next logical step in the waves of centralisation and decentralisation that characterise IT. One moment we think the best place for intelligence in the network is at the edge, then technology changes and it moves to the centre. When client-server came along, terminals became PCs and the mainframe morphed into the database server.
There are a number of myths which have sprung up around cloud which need to be addressed.
One of the reasons more and more organisations are adopting cloud services of one flavour or another is that the costs can come out of operational expenditure in nice little monthly packages instead of giant wedges of capital expenditure. Cloud also has the benefit of scale, enabling us to obtain better protected and more reliable services faster than we can often build them on-premise for the equivalent cost. However, that doesn’t mean we need to pay the recommended retail price.
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.
