Convince me Azure and/or SaaS are good ideas

[glenimp617]

My boss has been to a conference and come back with lots of ideas. He wants to move everything into the cloud and eventually operate an SaaS model. His leaving quote was "if airbnb can do it, we can"

so, let's say we go down this road. We move EVERYTHING into the cloud. Let's start with domain services. I mean I assume we need to get user accounts moved up. This "I assume" means buying the azure domain services package. The basic plan is $1 per user, per month. We have 10,000 users. Surely just moving to azure AD doesn't cost businesses $10,000 per month does it?

next up are the file servers. We have 20tb of general file server data. Now I think we can dump that in sharepoint for free at this place so that's maybe not an issue. Email is again sorted as we're in 365.

SQL, we have a 32 core sql server which is heavily used

local applications though, create an azure virtual server to host it?

windows desktops.....we image them using SCCM. That can't be in azure. What about full on dumb terminals to a windows session in azure?

remote workers, we use RDS gateway to an RDS farm so they have a like for like expereince. Assume we can move RDS into azure?

I've personally never heard of anything as daft, but keen to hear of any other company who undertook this change.

 

[danb21t]

Could get expensive!

Presume the company has multiple offices? Keep in mind you will ideally require diverse redundant transit circuits. If your transit line gets saturated and user experience suffers then you will be getting calls left, right and centre. Also if the line goes down, you loose connectivity to your business from your business premises. Ironic.

Hybrid approach seems to be common these days, you have to be selective of which services will benefit being cloud-afied.

 

[glenimp617]

Could get expensive!

Presume the company has multiple offices? Keep in mind you will ideally require diverse redundant transit circuits. If your transit line gets saturated and user experience suffers then you will be getting calls left, right and centre. Also if the line goes down, you loose connectivity to your business from your business premises. Ironic.

Hybrid approach seems to be common these days, you have to be selective of which services will benefit being cloud-afied.

No, three sites is all

Doesn't want hybrid, wants full on 100% cloud AND with cost savings lol

 

[danb21t]

Sounds like you (or someone) needs to cost up the running costs, licensing cost, maintenance costs, etc of the business as it stands. Then work out the same for onboarding everything into the unknown.

I suspect the 20TB of storage footprint might be the killer.

 

[Randomface74]

Yeah cost it all up, see if he still wants it when he sees the bill.

 

[LizardKing]

Its very easy to crate everything to azure (kind of) but your going to pay serious £££ for the privilege, the true savings from using the cloud is realised through re-aligning business applications (getting news ones if need be) and work process's to suit the cloud.
ie hosting a sql vm in azure is a very expensive way of hosting, hosting a sql database less so but to utilise them your app has to support it and there nuisances.
Then theres the fun and games of learning/securing/backing it all up. And everything has an indefinite £/per month next to it, no more capex over 3 years.

In other words, if your boss is serious I'd be very tempted to look elsewhere as thats a very shortsighted view imo

 

[Lanz]

We are going through the same exercise. It's very hard to cost up accurately, you need to really get a Azure partner involved to write a business case and give you a TCO, but even that will probably +-50% £££ over 5 years. This is why people decide on Hybrid, as it's almost impossible to predict the full costs for a 100% move. Before most moves, there's a whole load of app consolidation to consider before the move, as if you just lift and shift it'll cost you about 5x more than the on-prem equivalent. You might want to replace SCCM for Intune, optimize for SQL to use less cores, make sure all your VM's are smaller and more cloud ready.

It'll cost more, it'll probably be slower, but it's great for your CV so if your boss and the business are on-board, don't poo poo it...

 

[glenimp617]

How do we image desktop machines though for example?

We have wireless access points using radius and nps. Assume everything on our network will use static ip addresses unless you can run dhcp servers in azure.

 

[Lanz]

How do we image desktop machines though for example?

We have wireless access points using radius and nps. Assume everything on our network will use static ip addresses unless you can run dhcp servers in azure.

You can extend your LAN into Azure and run DHCP servers from it, would it be wise - probably not. Image servers, possible but not a good idea, print servers - probably not. CCTV recordings? The list goes on, that's why most people choose Hybrid once they have really looked into it.

 

[Caged]

If your idea of moving into the cloud is to replicate exactly what you have now on Azure then you're doing it wrong, and you won't see savings.

Sounds a bit bizarre that you're a 10,000 user organisation and your boss (presume CIO figure) can just go to a conference and come back talking all about the cloud. For one, he's a few years late to the party.

 

[glenimp617]

If your idea of moving into the cloud is to replicate exactly what you have now on Azure then you're doing it wrong, and you won't see savings.

Sounds a bit bizarre that you're a 10,000 user organisation and your boss (presume CIO figure) can just go to a conference and come back talking all about the cloud. For one, he's a few years late to the party.

I'd say it's very bizarre personally, but it is what is it.

I'm pricing up various models inc saas, iaas and daas. There are cost savings between saas and iaas but either one is a lot more expensive than what we are paying now.

Once the figures are presented, he will agree that what we are doing now (hybrid model and aligning ourselves to azure for the future) is still the right course of action. The plan I proposed years ago was just that. Local infarstructure services which are tied into the cloud such as layer2 connect to sharepoint, office365, local hyperv hooked into azure so we can move servers up to the cloud and back again etc etc.....that's not 100% cloud though

Still, it's fun when those at the very top haven't a clue what they're asking.

My question is always "why do you want to do this" and never get a meaingful answer.

To operate 100% in the cloud means a radical new approach to how IT services are used by the end user.

I'm yet to hear of any med/large organizations operating totally in the cloud.

 

[danb21t]

OP, how many staff does it take to run and maintain the current infrastructure.

Another alternative, could be to migrate services into a "tier 2" cloud provider. You will be aligned to a real account manager and could potentially tailor you their service offerings to fit your business requirements better. For example, if the company wants to reduce head count then they could take up an element of managed service, but also leave the on site sysadmins or application owners some flexiblity with a PaaS or SaaS.

Might work out better in the long run, might not, all depends on what your boss man actually wants.

 

[glenimp617]

OP, how many staff does it take to run and maintain the current infrastructure.

5 engineers supporting three uk sites and one overseas (inc full automated DR/BC failover). The overseas one is located in a region with extremely poor internet (which is also very expensive)

Nobody really knows what they want, that's the core problem. Personally, I listen to what the business needs and design a solution around that. The current infrastructure is running like clockwork (not trying to big myself up). We have reduced our servers by 50%, the remaining have all been replaced with new ones on 2016 (with all core services in HA). Automated reporting, auditing, health, alerting, updating etc etc which is why we can run everything with 5 engineers.....who are not busy by any means.

We had an external company come to give us a full IT security audit and we passed with flying colours.

 

[teaboy5]

You could make use of the some of Azures IaaS. If you want to save money it can be done. Just keep in mind that you will need good connections to ensure you have enough bandwidth into Azure/AWS etc etc. So some savings made in IaaS could be out done by increaring connection costs.

 

[danb21t]

Keep us updated on this, quite interested to see where this goes.

 

[glenimp617]

will do

 

[Caged]

OP, how many staff does it take to run and maintain the current infrastructure.

If you're just lifting and shifting a bunch of VMs running in VMware and putting them into Azure instead then unless you're such a big team that you have a dedicated person patching VMware and racking hardware I doubt there's going to be much in terms of staff savings - you're still having to patch the underlying operating systems and applications until you can shift your business apps to use the existing PaaS services (which requires some developer skills), or move entirely to SaaS.

 

[khrall]

A common misconception is that cloud is cheaper, someone buys into some presentation and instantly believes "Cloud is the answer!"

1.) Don't expect a lift and shift to be cheaper, it would be 50-100% more expensive, if not more - your paying for the flexibility of the platform, having the ability to spin up processes on demand does not come cheap. Think domino's pizza website on Tuesday/Weekend/Big match night and the additional demand required to keep up with the customer orders.

2.) In public cloud you do not want to be running 100% IaaS, you need to migrate systems over to PaaS/SaaS based models to start seeing comparable costs. As mentioned previously running a SQL VM in public cloud is an extremely expensive option vs Azure SQL DB.

3.) Data egress costs - unless you pay for dedicated connectivity (ExpressRoute unlimited plan).

4.) Architecting for minimal impact due to a service/region being unavailable is critical. SLA's on different configurations of virtual machines need a close inspection to ensure your business doesn't suddenly stop transacting. Read up on Regions/Update domains/fault domains/availability sets etc.

5.) Hybrid is the way forward, in my opinion, using Azure hybrid benefits and possibly reserved billing (but an upfront cost). Put the right systems in the right place - find a partner to work with.

 

[Si.]

As others have said, Azure, or any cloud platform, is not designed for a lift and shift.. Yes, you can do it but why would you?

You need to design your systems to work in a cloud environment. With a 10000 user base a totally cloud solution is the wrong solution, as already stated, Hybrid is the way to go. It offers the most flexibility and the most efficient costs.

What is the business? (Not the name, but what does it do?). If you're primarily an online business with web services then Cloud is ideal, if your a big number crunching database house then it's the wrong solution.

The worst thing anyone can do is jump onto the cloud band wagon without proper planning or knowledge on where this leads.

 

[Stelly]

My current outgoings on AWS is about $42,000 a month

Stelly