In the early years of computing, in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, we had mainframes. Through service modernisation and miniaturisation, things got smaller and the dawn of the personal computer was upon us. In the 1990’s, server rooms and corporate-owned datacenters were common-place. By the late 90’s through to the current times, virtualisation and consolidation of servers are everywhere to maximise the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of our IT investments.
Through all of this evolution and revolution, servers are still servers. A person or service wants something: a file or information [data] and the server serves it. With the revolution of public cloud, we are starting to see the birth of serverless services. Business processes and problem-solving that comes not from a dedicated server but from a cloud service.
What does all that mean now?
With modern computing and public cloud, simply running a virtual server in somebody else’s datacenter is far from the most efficient way of working. Running virtual machines is the most cost expensive way of running a cloud-based service and also requires the most operational overhead.
Server costs exposed
What are the costs of running a complete virtual server? It’s not just the cost of the server itself: it’s a far greater proposition than that.
- Licensing the operating system
- Monitoring the server uptime and services on it (which often requires running, licensing and maintaining a complex monitoring system)
- Backing up the server and the data on it
- Designing and maintaining high availability and disaster recovery
- Updates and patching
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a class of service where many of these things were built in for you, out of the box, with no effort or input from you.
So how can we apply service modernisation to it?
Arcible can help you assess your servers and services to identity areas of improvement, optimisation, and service modernisation. Some people call this replatforming or refactoring. Working as a Microsoft Partner, we work on-premises, in Microsoft 365, and in Microsoft Azure so we understand all aspects of it.
Some services can be quickly and easy flipped like converting web servers to Azure App Service instances or moving SQL Servers to Azure Database for SQL Server: two Platform-as-a-Service offerings that will provide you with far more options and features at lower costs.
Other services are more complex and involved and perhaps involve multiple servers and endpoints communicating with each other. Sometimes the cost involved in re-architecting an application outweighs the operational cost but you don’t know until you investigate it and that’s where Arcible can help.
Start identifying your areas for service modernisation
There can be many benefits to service modernisation but it’s not for everyone. Why not meet with Arcible and allow us to assess your services and applications to see where you can reap the rewards public cloud has to offer?