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, and public cloud servers and even serverless computing. Updating and consolidating management tools is critical to ensuring efficiency.

Physical

Although the majority of applications will likely have been virtualised, 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 options alongside alternatives such as MySQL, PostgressSQL, MongoDB and Cassandra to reduce cost and increase flexibility.

Primary Storage

Primary storage refers to production data that is typically of greatest concern in terms of security, performance, and availability.

This could reside on a mixture of Direct Attached, SAN, or more-recent HCI (Hyper-converged Infrastructure), and high performance public cloud capacity.

Big Data & Analytics

As the scale of data created by IoT increases, the ability to effectively secure, store, and analyse data is becoming paramount to better business. 

Systems can scale from the proactive management of a traditional archive to the adoption of Hadoop and/or SAP HANA architectures to store and analyse the data generated by customers and manufacturing processes.

Backup

The value of backup increases when focusing on restore capabilities for your business. Copies of files can be re-utilised for dev/test or data recovery purposes from any platform. 

Reducing data is critical to minimising cost and management. It is important to choose the right on-premises and cloud backup data depending on the business. Duplication of data is also an expense that can be analysed and optimised.

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 to meet legal regulations. It has typically been considered no more than a large set of low-value data which is infrequently 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

As more organisations look to consume services from public cloud, the operational overheads associated with some of the traditional modes of supporting IT can be replaced with the use of PaaS based options.

PaaS provides the services that can include databases, web and container based services whereby the infrastructure and core application is provided as part of a fully managed service by the cloud provider and the organisations uses the service provided to meet the requirement of the service or application demand.  This is a useful model as in many cases you pay for the transaction usage.

IoT

Internet of Things refers to devices creating data which can be leveraged by organisations to adapt and differentiate their offerings to meet the needs of clients.

DR

The value of data recovery increases when copies of files can be re-utilised for mulitple purposes from any platform, and to boot the business back up in critical circumstances. 

Reducing data is essential to minimising cost and management. It is important to choose the right on-premises and cloud backup data depending on the business. Duplication of data is also an expense that can be analysed and optimised.

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. Companies should communicate IT strategy clearly to stop testers and developers employing ‘shadow IT’ and using public cloud without informing IT Operations.

IaaS

As many organisations look to adopt cloud, the first step in many cases is to utilise the compute options available whereby a range of virtual machine sizes are available to consume against various options.  This could include a pay as you go for short term or scaling use cases or more predicable and constant workloads whereby reserved instance options are more suitable. 

Ultimately IaaS means that the underlying infrastructure is fully managed by the 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.