"With Azure Active Directory, Royal Dutch Shell provides fast, highly secure access to external vendors, cutting onboarding time from months to less than a week. “With SaaS solutions, you gain speed-of-change. Moving to the cloud is the overall Shell strategy to obtain a much more agile, fast-moving environment than we could with an on-premises space.”
Johan Krebbers, IT Chief Technology Officer at Royal Dutch Shell
Gartner's Recommended use cases: Microsoft Azure appeals to two types of customers, but for different reasons.
Recommended uses: All use cases that run well in a virtualized environment, particularly for Microsoft-centric organizations.
Microsoft Azure's core strength is its Microsoft heritage — its integrations (both current and future) with other Microsoft products and services, its leverage of the existing Microsoft ISV ecosystem, and its overall strategic importance to Microsoft's future. Azure has a very broad range of services, and Microsoft has steadily executed on an ambitious roadmap. Customers that are strategically committed to Microsoft technology generally choose Azure as their primary cloud provider.
Microsoft Azure's capabilities have become increasingly innovative and open, with improved support for Linux and open-source application stacks. Furthermore, many customers that are pursuing a multicloud strategy will use Azure for some of their workloads, and Microsoft's on-premises Azure Stack software may potentially attract customers seeking hybrid solutions.
Microsoft has sustained a very high growth rate over multiple years, and Gartner estimates its end-of-2017 revenue run rate for integrated IaaS+PaaS at more than $4 billion. Microsoft is leveraging its tremendous sales reach and ability to bundle Azure with other Microsoft products and services in order to drive adoption; Office 365 customers often decide it is most logical to adopt Azure. Microsoft is steadily growing the size of Azure customers; many are beginning to spend more than $500,000 a year, and a growing number exceed $5 million in annual spending.
You can get a free trial of Azure AD Premium to test these features, and our experts at Enabling Technologies can help you get them set up.
For a visual explanation of Azure AD, check out the 11-minute video. Many new capabilities have been added since its recording, but the fundamentals are still sound.
Early adopters of public cloud services like Azure experienced three main challenges; cost overruns, security, and manageability. Enabling’s Azure Foundation Deployment Service applies those lessons learned to provide a fundamental deployment of Azure services. We’ll educate you on how to get started, how to secure the environment, and then guide you through hands on deployment.
Enabling will provide foundation planning, design, and configuration services for up to (2) workloads (domain controller, web server, etc.). Our Azure Specialists will focus on:
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| Infrastructure & Network Planning |
Cost Management | Security | HA/DR |
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Options
Planning & Design
The result will be a documented plan to build a secure Azure tenant in the future.
Planning, Design & Deployment
The result will be a working Azure tenant with a secure foundation.
Early adopters of Azure Infrastructure and Storage as a Service occasionally report unexpected cost overruns. Often, those early experiences created a perception that Azure seems expensive. In fact, cost overruns are often due to improper configurations and misuse of Microsoft licensing advantages, not Azure’s inherent charges. Getting off on the wrong foot has stalled rollouts, especially when compared to organizations that followed best practices from the outset.
Enabling Technologies provides an Azure Audit Service to assess the existing Azure infrastructure and look for areas of improvement. Enabling’s Azure engineers focus on storage, virtual machines, networks, the use of IaaS versus PaaS, and other critical contributors to cost. Our engineers provide recommendations to optimize spending and performance based on Azure tools, experience, and best practices.
Our Engineers Will:
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The Result
The result is cost savings or at the least, a scale-able plan for expansion that can realize the intended ROI. We also train your IT audit staff to be equipped to understand and manage costs in the future. Getting cost under control can offer a more predictable, better managed Azure environment.
