Overview

Our Cloud and Datacenter team helps organizations to leverage the cloud to improve service delivery while at the same time reduce costs.

By taking advantage of Azure’s huge breath of capabilities and operational efficiencies, companies can reduce time-to-market, quickly and easily deploy infrastructure and platform solutions, deliver business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, and significantly reduce their overall datacenter footprint.

Microsoft’s world-class network provides the redundancy and scalability unmatched by any other cloud platform.

To operationalize Azure or multi-cloud environment, you need to have the following requirements in place.

• The Azure environment is operated by a corporation and runs with standards, policies and controls
• The environment runs a diverse workload including servers, containers, serverless, PaaS, AI or digital ledgers
• You have a certain amount of stakeholder management – delegated to targeted teams, under corporate oversight
• The Azure environment is representative of your technology investments – areas like cost should relate to your intended investment areas

Operationalizing your environment can be done in the following 10 steps.

• Step 1: Understand how organizational teams need to change to operate effectively in the cloud – need for more collaborative teams who can focus on cloud enablement rather than cloud delivery
• Step 2: Define an operational platform in iterative steps – put in place things that are most important and build on them over time
• Step 3: Build a blueprint, management groups, and subscription structures – you can't operate a proper Azure environment if you haven’t structured it properly
• Step 4: Define your provisioning approaches, both short term and long term – provisioning in the cloud is different than provisioning on-premise
• Step 5: Define your structures for naming and tagging – use a naming standard that makes sense
• Step 6: Have recovery and re-deployment approaches for corporate IT and application owners
• Step 7: Adapt your security controls to a cloud consistent word – security methods are different for the cloud environment than they are for on-premise
• Step 8: Monitoring responsibilities change as application owners take more responsibility – corporate IT should be responsible for the overall cloud program, not the individual apps
• Step 9: Let go of your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) – the platform is queriable and the configuration is code
• Step 10: Build a methodology for cost reviews and organizational discipline around this – you need to be able to judge the cost on the owner, business unit, application, technology, and what it is

For more detail on each step, please watch this video.