After picking up the Cloud Solution Provider of the Year award at the IT Europa Channel Awards in May, IT Europa spoke to Dominic Green (pictured), Practice Lead for Cloud at Northdoor plc, to discuss its recent work with Blue Cube Travel, its migration to Azure cloud and the future devlelopments of cloud technologies.
With their successful migration to the Azure cloud, Blue Cube Travel data is better positioned to compete with other travel enterprises. Why did Blue Cube Travel outsource and select Northdoor to manage their migration to the Microsoft Azure cloud?
BlueCube approached us, and there was a competitive situation to take over their ageing on-premise infrastructure and modernise it. We were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity. The entire environment refresh tied in with them moving offices, presenting a broader scope to what we could offer and achieve with more flexibility and removing a painful hardware relocation as part of the move.
What are some strategic benefits of migrating the travel management firm’s IT systems to the Azure cloud?
The business is more agile and can scale up and down when required, which has proved helpful during COVID. They have a more resilient solution which can failover in minutes to another region, and from a security standpoint, the same applies if there is a security event. Azure can roll back with an RPO of under a minute to minimise impact. That rollback also takes minutes, meaning the business doesn’t suffer from extended downtime.
Cloud technology has become a rapidly growing force in recent years, exacerbated by the pandemic and the rise of remote working. How did Blue Cube’s migration to the cloud enable it to survive better?
As I have already mentioned, being more agile and scaling up and down when required proved invaluable during the pandemic. In recent times Blue Cube, I’m pleased to say, is scaling up to support the travelling revival, and the cloud allows this to happen quickly.
Data security is paramount to a business like Blue Cube. How did Blue Cube’s migration to Azure cloud improve its security posture? How did you help reduce Blue Cube’s business risk and ensure it implemented best practice security policies?
Cloud security is a hot topic, and yes, there are multiple tools in Azure to mitigate security issues and AI tools to enhance security further. As part of our managed services solution, we monitor the environment and proactively support any security effort required. We hardened the Azure server images as a first step and have worked closely with a security partner to monitor the environment 24/7 with 3rd part tools that seamlessly plug into the Azure cloud service.
What did you do to ensure Key stakeholders were involved throughout the design and implementation process?
As a n organisation that is well aware of the importance of stakeholder by in. Regular project planning meetings and draft designs we’re initially created and a project definition workshops to ensure everyone was aware of what we we’re offering but ultimately the benefitas the new world could offer Blue Cube.
Globally, ISG expects cloud services spending to increase by 20% in 2022. Is it better to handle a cloud migration project in-house or outsource to a partner that understands the cloud the same way Northdoor does?
Azure updates on a near daily basis. We are an organisation that has seen and evolved with the history of the Azure platform but has a significant enough relationship with Microsoft that we can map out future changes, which is a massive benefit for any organisation we work alongside. It makes sense to bring in a partner like ourselves to ensure that your cloud design and migration plans are valid and pitfalls and poor execution are avoided.
Is outsourcing your cloud migration project more cost-effective than keeping it all in-house?
Yes and no. Cloud services can be expensive, and as we have seen in recent years, Finops is a vast market where cloud spending is under the spotlight. Cloud can be more cost-effective, but It has to be done right, and cost management is one of the components that can assist with this. Cloud migrations are relatively straightforward, but having a complete 360 view of the patform can m, make cloud services more compelling than buying more hardware and colocation services.
What are the future trends/developments of the cloud? What’s on the horizon for cloud technologies in 2022 and beyond?
We see a considerable amount of data ops opportunities whereby some clients are already touching cloud services and looking at ways to utilise the data in cloud storage. Existing clients who have completed an IAAS play are now looking at ways to reduce spending further with PaaS and SaaS offerings. Additionally, security and compliance are driving more secure methods of doing things and eradicating legacy services for compliance reasons. So security and modernisation have been at the forefront recently.
