Azure Cloud

First of all, let’s define what is meant by the term cloud asset management. There’s no question that it’s a huge benefit to be able to access the cloud from any physical location using any electronic device. However, as is the case with physical data storage, there is generally some kind of requirement for secure storage and access, and that’s where asset management comes in.

Cloud asset management attempts to solve the issues of secure storage and access, and the way that it manages business-critical data securely on the cloud. Most businesses will employ a number of different asset management solutions in order to control and effectively administer their digital assets, but a cloud-based solution will generally be superior to an in-house solution because of its more robust security features, as well as its ease of administration. All businesses will require total control of their business assets on the cloud. By employing a safe asset management solution, many different teams within your business can easily access needed data and monitor their assets effectively.

Importance of The Right Asset Management

Cloud asset management is necessary so as to safeguard business-critical data, and to ensure that it can be accessed by business teams from any geographic location. When you have complete control of your business assets, it becomes easier to run your business operation and provide the access needed by relevant teams within your company. If you didn’t have this kind of control over your cloud assets, it could cause improper handling of data considered to be business-critical.

For example, you certainly wouldn’t want this information to be accessed by people whom it was not intended for. Having a great asset management tool will help to avoid security lapses, and at the same time ensure smooth business operations. Cloud asset management will also allow you to stay on top of your business assets, so they can be tracked and managed effectively. If you didn’t have this kind of tight control, it could easily lead to overspending and a general loss of business productivity.

Is It Right for Your Company?

As a general rule of thumb, deciding on the right asset management approach often follows the size of the business you have currently. For example, if your business is a smaller one with limited physical and digital assets, you may be able to get by with an in-house asset management system fairly well. Larger organizations will generally have a greater need for cloud asset management, because they have a great many more physical and digital assets that need to be managed and tightly controlled.

If you think your business would benefit by some of the most notable advantages of cloud asset management, you should contact a provider like ours and seek additional information on how it can benefit your specific organization. You’ll have improved access for business requirements like remote work, you’ll have all data stored and managed from a single location, you’ll be able to include attached images and records using cloud-based tools, and it will be much easier to manage large data sets effectively.

If your business is a relatively large one, and these benefits would be of real value to your organization, you should strongly consider implementing a program of cloud asset management.

Let us Know How We Can Help Solve Your Cloud Asset Management Needs

If you’re considering an initiative for cloud asset management in San Antonio, you should contact us today so we can discuss the benefits of Microsoft Azure. You’ll notice the tremendous advantages of having complete control over your business assets and critical data, and you may even end up saving money because you’ll have greater control and visibility over all assets.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) rose to prominence during the pandemic which afflicted the entire globe, and is even today still making its presence felt. During this time, remote teams proved they could still be productive and successful, regardless of where they were working and how spread out they were from the central company. In the aftermath of all that, companies are having to scramble in order to facilitate the technological needs of both remote workers and hybrid workers.

Desktop-as-a-service can fill in the gaps nicely here and provide the needed services for workers. At its heart, DaaS is a secure, high-performance, efficient method of desktop virtualization. It frees businesses from having their computer operating systems tied to physical hardware, and instead allows businesses to use DaaS as a means of accessing virtual desktops on the Internet by using a cloud provider. Cloud providers who offer this type of service can manage virtual desktops directly from their own centralized data centers.

Benefits provided by DaaS

Here are some of the most notable and beneficial advantages of implementing a DaaS service, such as Azure Virtual Desktop for your company:

Lowers IT costs – DaaS solutions can save your company a great deal of money by shifting the cost of on-premises hardware and software to a cloud-based environment where desktops can be purchased as needed.

Increased security – There are fewer security risks posed by DaaS, because the data will all reside directly at the cloud providers’ datacenter, as opposed to being stored on tablets, desktops, or phones used by employees.

Facilitates remote work – With the steadily rising popularity of remote work, a different approach is necessary to access data and applications. Using a DaaS like Azure Virtual Desktop, IT teams can easily move between platforms, and access needed data from multiple machines, regardless of their physical location.

Extend shelf-life of legacy machines – Companies which can’t afford to upgrade all their outdated machines will have the option instead to use DaaS to install a brand-new operating system on all machines. Serving this new operating system from the cloud is far more affordable than replacing all your on-premises equipment simultaneously.

Supports bring-your-own-device (BYOD) – Using DaaS, a bring-your-own-device policy can be supported, so employees are not obliged to only use company-issued devices or to use the same device at all times. This means employees can use their own laptops, tablets, and phones to accomplish work projects and tasks.

Simplifies desktop management – The administrative load can be significantly reduced by outsourcing the deployment, configuration, and management of any company’s virtual desktops. It’s also much easier to scale up or down using DaaS, so it won’t be necessary to manage that in-house.

Is DaaS right for you?

If your company is one that has a significant number of employees working remotely, you should consider DaaS as one possible solution. It can make your life much easier, while also providing the services needed by your employees, in order to remain productive and successful on the job. Keep in mind that you should also be able to enjoy all the benefits described above, and these are some significant reasons for you to avail yourself of DaaS services.

Contact us today if you’re interested in finding out more about how your company can benefit by using the DaaS Azure Virtual Desktop on the cloud. We can help get you setup very quickly, so your employees can start making immediate use of remote desktop services at whatever location they happen to be at.

With many businesses already having positioned themselves on the cloud for efficiency and savings, you’d think that there’s a fairly good understanding about cloud storage and what it can do for you. Even though 94% of all businesses use at least some form of cloud service, only about 50% of all corporations currently store their business-critical data there. That means many companies are still in the process or considering a move to the cloud. Here are some of the questions most often asked about cloud computing, and the answers may be helpful in having you reach a decision for your own business.

Frequently asked questions

Q: How safe is the cloud?

A: While the cloud is subject to constant attack from cyber criminals, most providers have some excellent security measures in place. When negotiating with a particular provider, be sure to find out what kind of security they have in place.

Q: Is cloud storage still popular?

A: Absolutely. It is currently a $370 billion dollar business, and by the year 2025 it is expected to soar to the astronomical level of $832 billion.

Q: How many companies actually use cloud service currently?

A: Approximately 94% of all companies use some kind of cloud services, even if they don’t have their company data stored there.

Q: What’s the difference between private, public, and hybrid clouds?

A: Private clouds are only used by a single enterprise, which means they would then maintain all the hardware and infrastructure. A public cloud is used by multiple businesses, and none of these would be responsible for any kind of maintenance. A hybrid cloud is one which allows you to use both a private cloud and a public one when it is advantageous for you to do so.

Q: How much data is actually stored on the cloud?

A: By the time 2025 rolls around, there will be more than 100 zettabytes stored on the cloud. A zettabyte is equivalent to one billion terabytes, or one trillion gigabytes. Also by 2025, there will be more than 200 zettabytes of data stored on all media, with half that being on the cloud.

Q: Who is the biggest provider of cloud services?

A: At present, the largest provider of cloud services is Amazon Web Services. Amazon has about 31% of the total market share, which is considerable, given the number of companies making use of the service.

Q: Which geographic region has the biggest share of cloud computing services?

A: By far, North America uses the biggest share of cloud services, at a whopping 61%. The next closest area would be Western Europe, at a distant 21%.

Q: How did COVID-19 impact cloud services?

A: COVID-19 caused a sudden flock of businesses to join the cloud, because so many workers were obliged to do remote work at that time.

Q: What is a data warehouse?

A: It is a setup which can incorporate both current and historical data, because businesses often have a need for detailed analysis of data. A data warehouse is capable of handling all these needs, because it is designed to handle long-range data needs over a period of time.

Q: What is microservices architecture?

A: This type of architecture allows a very large application to be broken down into smaller, functional applications so that services can be provided to the requestor much more quickly and efficiently.

Q: What are containers?

A: These are self-contained packages including all the elements necessary to run in virtually any kind of computing environment. Development teams often make use of containers, because they facilitate rapid development and efficient deployment.

Ready to join the cloud?

At some point in the near future, most businesses will be situated on the cloud. Now is the time for your company to make the move, and realize some of the same advantages and benefits that other companies have been enjoying for years already. You will probably save money on monthly operating costs, and you’ll gain some remarkable efficiencies while doing so. Contact us today to get setup for the exciting world of cloud service.

Businesses and IT enterprises alike are transitioning more from on-site IT systems to the cloud and are likewise making more use of cloud computing consulting services. The global pandemic has added more momentum to the cloud migration trend, with businesses spending 36.4 billion on cloud-based solutions in just three months in 2020. 

But what is the cloud, exactly? Traditionally, business owners and managers have invested in buying IT hardware for their business’s IT infrastructures, such as servers and storage, that are kept and managed on-site. When we talk about the cloud, we are talking about access over the internet operated by dedicated cloud hosts and cloud computing consulting groups.

The job of the cloud hosts is to keep the servers and each client’s business infrastructure running efficiently with the latest data security protocols. Migrating to the cloud isn’t a complex decision when you’re working with a dedicated managed cloud service provider because they function like your own in-house IT department.

Why Companies are Moving to the Cloud

So why are so many companies moving their data and business infrastructure to the cloud? 

The main reasons include: 

• Lowering IT Costs 
• Improving Business Agility
• Better Security 
• Improving Scalability
• Storage Space

Below is a little more detail regarding these points.

Lowering IT Costs 

Moving IT infrastructure to the cloud allows businesses to stop wasteful spending on hardware that they may not need. Rather than estimate the future hardware requirements of their business’s IT infrastructure and then purchase or lease the required equipment, migrating to the cloud gives businesses much more flexibility.  

Cloud providers can provide the right amount of IT resources based on the business’s real-time requirements as they migrate more data and infrastructure to the cloud instead of relying on preliminary estimates. This also means that last-minute adjustments are extremely easy to make, and a business’s infrastructure capabilities will not limit its growth in the future.

Improving Business Agility 

The global economy demands that businesses run at peak performance without interruptions. And when a problem occurs, companies can no longer afford to wait days, weeks, or even months on new hardware or a hardware specialist.

Migrating to the cloud improves a business’s agility because when an issue occurs, there is a fully qualified IT professional on the other end of the cloud who can diagnose the problem and provide instant fixes. This accessibility reduces unwanted downtime and interruptions for a more agile and resilient system. 

Better Security 

One of Deloitte’s latest surveys of over 500 IT executives showed that security and data protection were the number-one reasons businesses migrated to the cloud. 58 percent of their respondents ranked security and data protection as a top priority, which is understandable since the cloud allows companies to: 

• Modernize IT infrastructure for better protection.
• Implement the latest best practices in data protection.
• Gain access to 24/7 monitoring services from their cloud provider.
• Customize their IT security based on their particular operation. 
• Leverage the latest technologies as new security innovations appear.

Business Scalability and Storage

Business growth relies on organic expansion, mergers, or acquisitions, and infrastructure must keep up with increasing demand. New investments need to be integrated into existing business platforms. Cloud computing consulting groups and cloud storage makes growth processes seamless and can also provide businesses instantly with additional storage space as they need it.