Line of business

Line of Business applications are often bespoke, business-critical apps which influence local productivity and rely heavily on availability and performance. Traditional performance and security mixed with modern readiness creates systems with the potential to disrupt and differentiate.

Compute

Many organisations will have use cases for physical, virtual, public cloud servers and even serverless computing. With many different clusters and with many different applications running on them, management and security is key.

Physical

Although most applications can be run on virtualised platforms, many are held back by compatibility, availability, or performance concerns. Some legacy systems are also heavily customised or are only compatible with previous-generation hardware.

Databases

Databases often contain the crown jewels of the business. Performance and security are an absolute necessity.

Increasingly, customers are considering PaaS or SaaS alternatives to on-premises databases, reflecting the importance of databases in webscale architectures. There is more scope than ever, with new database technologies such as MongoDB, MySQL, Apache Cassandra, Neo4J and others becoming more prevalent.

Primary Storage

Primary storage is the place to store your production data, which is typically of greatest concern in terms of security, performance, reliability and availability.

Production data can be stored on premises in traditional or hyper, or in the cloud, depending on your business needs.

Big Data & Analytics

As data volumes increase from existing systems and new unstructured and semi-structured sources, such as Social and IoT, new techniques are required to manage this data.

Solutions can range from improving existing architecture features, for example, databases and data visualisation, through to specialised solutions like SAP S4/HANA, Apache Spark and AWS Redshift.

Backup

It is important to choose the right on-premises and cloud backup data platform for the business. Understanding how copies of your data can be used for different purposes such as test/dev can add value to your backups.

Saas

Software as a Service are applications which are consumed on demand from a publicly-hosted platform. They include tools like Office 365, HR, CRM, and Expenses platforms which require little customisation and do not differentiate.

Archive Storage

Archive data often needs to be retained for e-discovery. Typically, it has been considered no more than a contingency plan, unlikely to be accessed, but big data and analytics are helping unlock the potential held in the archives.

Web Apps

Web Apps are a prime example of how businesses can thrive in the cloud. They often require frequent development, have seasonal customer access demands, and contain little sensitive data, making them ideally suited to off-premises storage.

PaaS

Organisations who are consuming services from public cloud can reduce the operational overheads of managing infrastructure by using Platform as a Service.

PaaS provides services where both the infrastructure and core application are provided as part of a fully managed service, including databases, web, and container-based services. This is a useful model as in many cases you pay for the transaction usage.

IoT

The Internet of Things represents a whole new category of networked devices, generating vast quantities of data.

Through analysis of this data, organisations can identify ways to drive operational efficiency and improve services. While this opens a huge range of possibilities, it also poses the challenge of moving, processing, filtering and storing this data. This has an impact not only on the infrastructure but also process and policy.

DR

The value of disaster recovery lies in having the right data in the right platform. This is essential to minimising upfront cost, management and being able to restore your business quickly.

Remote Branch Users

Remote users often create a large management overhead, as businesses need to meet the complexities of the ‘any device, any app, anywhere’ user.

They must consider which tools can be standardised for remote and centralised data services, including primary infrastructure, backup, and recovery, along with the appropriate EUC mechanisms to underpin user experience and security.

Test/Dev

Test & Dev non-production workloads are obvious candidates for public cloud. They involve urgent, frequent, and unpredictable requests with unknown future demands. Organisations should communicate IT strategy clearly to stop testers and developers employing ‘shadow IT’ and using public cloud without informing IT Operations.

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service is the first step to adopting cloud. A range of virtual machine sizes are available for public consumption from a highly scalable managed environment. This includes pay-as-you-go for short term requirements and reserved instance options for more predictable and constant workloads. 

IaaS means that the underlying infrastructure is fully managed by cloud providers and organisations consume compute resources.

VDI

Application and desktop virtualisation has allowed organisations to centralise management to drive efficiencies and reduce remote management, patching, and security concerns.

Many customers rely heavily on the evolved Hybrid Cloud capabilities of Citrix, VMware or Microsoft technologies for these purposes.