Cloudy with a view to management

Digitalization has long been unthinkable without the cloud. The digital transformation is no longer just taking place in the minds of German companies, but is now being implemented in practice. While the availability of immense computing power and the tailoring of applications to the exact needs of the respective departments are increasing, for many companies there is hardly any way around the benefits of the revolution in IT departments.

At the same time, it is clear to many managers and decision-makers that they do not have the capacity to find the right path to a modern IT infrastructure in the jungle of possible technologies, providers and solutions.

An assessment of the company's own infrastructure and the desired IT architecture, which is at the preliminary end of the journey, can already provide a good initial overview of coherent strategies for achieving the goals. However, companies and service providers such as Devoteam can also provide support in implementing the desired migration in a far-reaching manner and at the same time achieve the best possible results for daily business.

However, the bottom line for those responsible should always be added value - be it through support in strategic planning, help with migration to the desired cloud architecture, on-the-job training for employees or even a detailed assessment.

Where does the market stand?

Particularly when it comes to the trend topic of cloud and all the associated issues, separate providers have developed for each niche in recent years. Accordingly, after the initial narrowing down of a strategy for their own cloud project, the first question for many companies is which type of provider can ultimately provide the desired services - or whether one provider alone has the decisive capacities to go the whole way.

A recently published Forrester study identifies four types of providers with different strategic advantages and disadvantages that are relevant and interesting for companies and their cloud strategy.

However, these basic market forms and offerings can be expanded to include an additional category that is particularly relevant for complex IT applications such as SAP. Companies often want to migrate existing SAP systems to the cloud quickly and at the best possible cost, and in doing so want to share the benefits of the capacities offered by this infrastructure with their customers in the best possible way.

Here, managed cloud sourcing, which can be considered an extended form of managed services, is the optimal solution. In addition to the advantages of MSPs, this concept also combines the experience of CI and GSI. With the help of this extensive experience and expertise, customers who rely on ma-naged cloud sourcing receive accurate planning regarding the expected costs. They can also benefit from the financial advantages that the cloud ultimately has to offer.

Knowledge as a Service

In times of skills shortages, which are hitting the IT departments of many companies particularly hard, companies that have decided to migrate complex infrastructures to the cloud are facing essential challenges.

Specialists who could take care of a cloud migration are often not yet available - especially in companies that have only recently worked out a strategy - and training their own experts is proving difficult. However, with regard to the market situation and business competition, pressure is building up at the same time to pursue the selected cloud strategy in order not to fall behind.

This point is mitigated by managed cloud sourcing. Companies such as Devoteam, which positioned themselves here early on, have the appropriate specialists who can compensate for the shortage of specialists at companies and thus - either in the medium or long term - provide support for migration and the first steps from the SAP system in the new cloud environment.
environment can afford. For this reason, Devoteam will have its own academy starting in November, which will provide on-site IT specialists with the tools they need to draw on the expertise they require in the future.

Use resources flexibly

One of the key advantages of cloud-based IT infrastructures is their flexibility. While on-premises solutions need to be planned for the long term and therefore often have to be planned (and paid for) for largely unused capacities, cloud architectures can be easily adapted to the capacities required in each case.

Business-related actions, such as quarterly closings, special retail promotions like Black Friday or the launch of a new product - in other words, any form of periodic or regularly occurring unplanned workload peaks for IT - can be easily planned and implemented cost-effectively using managed cloud sourcing.

In addition to these periodic factors, however, it is also possible to take a granular look at day-to-day business operations and thus envisage resource-efficient capacity management. Critical systems that must be available to employees at all times are essential for companies. In addition to these productive systems, which must be available 24/7, there are also project systems, sandboxes and partially required systems.

Typically, these systems only run at certain times - or when employees need to access them for planned and future projects. Managed cloud sourcing and the resulting flexible cloud system landscapes can help companies to work in a cost-optimized manner. In the end, only what is actually used is paid for in this system.

Conclusion

Especially for companies at the beginning of their cloud journey, the range of cloud services and possible strategies is often confusing. The decision to rely on the expertise of different specialists on the market is therefore obvious - especially for IT systems such as SAP, which require a strategy tailored precisely to them. Managed cloud sourcing allows the decisive advantages of the individual specialists in the cloud market to be optimally combined.

As a result, companies can derive a decisive benefit from cloud technology for their own IT and business-critical applications, while at the same time maintaining their own flexibility - both in terms of the (external) experts involved in the project and the costs incurred. Feel free to contact our experts to find out how you too can benefit from managed cloud sourcing: en.devoteam.com/SAPManagedServices