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.

 

[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

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[glenimp617]

will do