The 2008 Mortgage Crisis and the attacks on September 11, 2001 were events that fundamentally reshaped our lives and economies- the former initiated sweeping bank reforms and the latter transformed our resolve and tactics towards airport and national security.
The current climate and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic will precipitate changes as well. One thing business has learned is that it cannot afford another disruption at this scale and magnitude. This is exactly why businesses must employ agility in their business architecture in order to remain flexible and adaptable during the event of global disruption.
Corporate is the New Bottleneck
Networking professionals are accustomed to identifying and eliminating bottlenecks. A redundant mesh architecture enforces network load balancing and provides multiple layers of resiliency. In the previous month, companies have learned that designing resiliency into their personnel locations has become a realized necessity. Previously, remote-work programs encompassed a small part of the work force for most organizations. It made perfect sense for some positions such as sales, project management or tech support. In a matter of weeks, remote work has gone from the exception to the norm.
The size of the corporate enterprise has expanded as employees have been working from home due to the COVID-19 quarantine measures. This immense transitory movement has resulted in a baptism-by-fire situation in which internal IT is scrambling to accommodate a surplus of workloads coming into the network. Trying to accommodate hundreds or thousands of remote users for infrastructure built for a fraction of the load is proving daunting.
The Shortcomings of VPN and VDI
For remote workers, there are two primary ways to access mission critical intranet applications. The first is for internal IT to make these applications directly accessible from the outside which opens them up to hackers and malicious parties. The other is VPN. While VPN provides the necessary security for application workload access, most organizations are saddled by limited hardware capacity and VPN software licensing. VPN systems that were designed for 10 to 20 percent of the employee population are overloaded instantly.
Then there is the issue of VDI. Many users depend on desktop shortcuts and desktop configuration policies that provide easy access to internal inline applications. These ‘thick client’ enterprises’ applications were not necessarily designed to service high-latency remote connections. This possesses a huge problem because the vast majority of remote workers are limited to consumer grade wireless at home.
The Great Acceleration of the Cloud
The current challenges companies face today are only accelerating trends that were already in place. One is remote work, and the other is the migration of on-premise data centers to the cloud. The big cloud service providers (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) are all poised to succeed during these challenges. In fact, according to the latest Forrester IT spending forecast, the only positive sign of continued growth within the IT industry is cloud infrastructure services.
It’s simple, really. Cloud services can be accessed from anywhere (within reason). No need for restricting VPN connections or complicated VDI deployments. When your applications reside in the cloud, remote workspaces connect directly to them without bottlenecking through the corporate network connection. Cloud-based architecture injects much needed agility and simplicity into newly expanded enterprises.
Microsoft reported a 40 percent jump in online collaboration software users in a week. Italy experienced a 775 percent increase in Teams usage for March. They also report that deployments of their Windows Virtual Desktop has tripled. The three cloud providers are reporting increased subscriptions and server deployment volume as well.
Let iQuate Assist your Cloud Migration Acceleration
The sudden exodus of the workforce from offices to remote desktops has magnified the glaring detail that companies did not have the capable infrastructure or scale to handle this mass migration. Cloud migration requires careful planning, analysis and strategy, and this is a painful lesson in why it is important not to blindly lift and shift your way to the cloud.
iQCloud brings ease and agility to your cloud migration planning with:
- Automated and agentless discovery and service mapping of your enterprise workloads
- Full end-to-end service-centric views of your entire IT estate – Hybrid support for on-premises and cloud
- Complete workload cost comparison analysis across GCP, AWS, and Azure
iQuate can help you in rightsizing your workloads by accurately determining workload performance and capacity requirements. By undergoing the rightsizing process in the beginning, we can help you optimize costs by negating the need to overprovision, which is a consequence of lift and shift migrations. And frequently, we find ways to reduce eliminate excess capacity and resources, resulting in lower costs.
These are uncertain times. However, your move to the cloud does not have to be. iQuate has established itself as a leading cloud migration partner to companies across the world. Stay prepared for the challenges ahead with iQuate and reach out today to learn more about iQCloud.
