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Welcome to today's CIT Tech for Business podcast.

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Today, we're sitting down with Kyle and Jake to

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kick off our IT budgeting series.

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What we're going to be chatting about today is

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budgeting for moving to the Cloud.

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Let's start it off with you guys both

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introducing yourself to our audience today.

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Thanks, Tara. My name is Kyle Adam,

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the President and CEO at CIT.

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I've been with the organization now.

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Going into 29 years.

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Just love this topic.

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Very passionate about Cloud and Cloud Services.

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I am Jake Williamson.

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I've been at CIT for about 10 years now,

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and I'll lead up our Cloud Services Department.

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I manage that team of field resources who do

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project-based work surrounding what we're going to talk about today.

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Thanks, Jake and Kyle. I appreciate that.

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We're going to kick it off today by explaining the Cloud.

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Tell me what that is.

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The Cloud, awesome.

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Has lots of different meanings depending on who you ask.

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But everybody is using it at some degree today in some fashion.

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The Cloud is really taking the IT resources that you use to

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communicate to work, to access resources,

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share files and work through things,

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but hosting that on an externally hosted solution.

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Managed in the Cloud.

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Somewhere in a data center.

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Probably in the United States,

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somewhere near where you live,

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but something that's not managed at your office anymore.

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You don't have to carry the overhead of

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the hardware and the software behind it.

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Something you pay Microsoft to do that for you.

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Yeah, just to add on that.

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It's also usually associated from

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a financial standpoint of a subscription-based service where

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you're not outright purchasing software or hardware any longer,

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but you're subscribing to

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the service that is in the laws for that scalability side of it.

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Jake mentioned on the Microsoft side, could be email.

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But we all use it in our personal lives into services such as Spotify.

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There's other areas where you're just consuming,

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you just pay for the right to consume.

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That's one of the biggest powers of

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the Cloud services that are available out there.

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It's just that scalability and the ability to adjust costs.

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Awesome. Looking at our IT budgeting part of this,

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that's what is the Cloud.

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If somebody was looking to migrate into the Cloud,

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what would that first step look like?

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The first step is analyzing your current environment,

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taking a look at what do you have for resources today.

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Most customers are utilizing Cloud services across the board.

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One thing we like to do is pull those together and utilize

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a single source of licensing that can manage multiple aspects for you.

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Let's take a look at your on-premise environment and look at how do we want to

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build this thing out in the future?

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How should we structure it for the long-term?

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We want to handle the immediate needs,

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but we also want to structure it off those long-term goals and get away from

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the conventional architecture like we've been building it today.

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Kyle, any thoughts on that?

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Yeah. Again, I think it's also

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aligned with the user impact side of that.

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There's a training aspect to it with many customers.

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As you get into these Cloud services,

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you find there are bundling or

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a lot of additional services that come along with it.

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We're looking at Office 365.

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It's a very common topic where they move to there for

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email services is maybe where they started

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in teams over the last few years with the pandemic side of that.

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But then they come back and start to look at additional services such as

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file storage with OneDrive and even

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data analytics with Power BI and a number of different tools that are available.

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There's a lot of additional services that users need to be introduced to.

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There's new ways to work and collaborate that come with these services.

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You want to take an approach to bring

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the training aspect in there and at least get some understanding and start to have a plan.

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It's never a boom, it's there.

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It's a work in progress to get there.

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But there's a tremendous value overall if you do take that approach to really

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holistically look at your workflows and your collaboration and your other areas.

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Because you're paying that expense and you can really drive the most value by leveraging those areas.

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So it's quite a feat to take what you have today and figure out,

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okay, how do we get to the Cloud?

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You want to get there, right?

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That's what we spend most of our time talking with customers on,

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as what is the first step and how do we start introducing the Cloud into their environment.

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A lot of customers are already there to some degree, right?

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We've touched that a couple of times.

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So really stepping back, taking a look at their on-premise environment.

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What are they using today?

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How can we take these?

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Will these a Cloud-based solutions?

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One thing that's used quite a bit is a term called Software as a Service,

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where you're actually paying a company to host your email for you,

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host your Microsoft Teams,

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your OneDrive, your SharePoint storage, things like that.

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Where you can get away from having an on-premise SharePoint server,

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an on-premise Exchange server, a file server for managing these things.

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So you take a look at everything they have in your organization

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and how your end users are able to work today,

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and you start structuring that out and basing that up in a Cloud-based solution for you.

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So you can start minimizing that onsite overhead that you've been carrying today.

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That's going back to the budget topic side with that.

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The impact to the budgeting side of those is no longer having to do the five-year pre-purchase

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of storage and servers,

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and even from your, if you have IT onsite support,

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or even outside support,

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typically Exchange and those other side in SharePoint,

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those are large service-based products for onsite.

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They require quite a bit of administration.

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They require data backups, not only for the storage,

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but also for the recovery and those things.

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So there's ramifications of the impact to the overall budget

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that really starts coming to play that are no longer necessary,

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because they're just part of that monthly reoccurring or annual spend.

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Yeah. One thing to think about too is the amount of workforce that's working remotely now too.

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We're not all working inside of the office anymore,

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or we have to access the files that are sitting right down the hallway in the server closet.

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We need to be able to access these things from home,

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from all sorts of locations.

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A lot of companies are hiring staff that are working in other states, CIT included.

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We have people all across the country.

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So we're able to utilize these utilities to make their ability to work even easier for them,

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and keeps it secure.

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We're knocking down holes that are open into the environment by securing them through

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third-party cloud-based solutions,

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and we're able to put security and structure around that too.

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Yeah. I think that's a great point.

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And again, we talked about that in a brief way going through that.

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But there's been a lot of client requests.

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There certainly was over the last two years to make accessibility to the systems

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and the collaboration tools and how they do their job.

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And many customers that had to deal with VPNs, it was problematic.

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Not only from scalability to suddenly having going from a few users needing to remote access

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to an entire workforce, presented a lot of scalability challenges, accessibility, and

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data access, where customers that were on a cloud platform were more mature side with it.

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It was far more seamless, and the impact of the business was greatly minimized,

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and a lot of her tremendous flexibility with that.

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So that's a tremendous point, Jake, to get to,

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is just that accessibility with a work-anywhere-style technology that the cloud services really provide.

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Yeah. So I think we've identified quite a few reasons as to why we should move to the cloud, right?

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And services that are managed in the cloud that would be beneficial to most customers.

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Now, we talk about the fun part of moving to the cloud, and that's designing it.

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Right? I know that's my favorite part. I don't know about you, kind of.

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I think you enjoy designing it, too.

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Yeah. Yeah. It is a lot of fun.

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Again, it is the understanding and spending time to learn how users work and where all your data lives

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and how they interact. Jake alluded to this earlier.

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There's a lot of work and a lot of discussions that really need to happen,

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because people have become comfortable and just creatures of habit,

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knowing and just assuming things to work.

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But we hear that often to say, I want to move my file server to the cloud.

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And it's just not as simple as moving the files.

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Obviously, there's a tremendous impact to the workflow of the users that need to be analyzed,

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as well as obviously the types of files and how they're using the files and the engineering drawings.

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Is it Word or Excel and PowerPoint or typical, clever files?

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There's a lot there. There's a lot of questions to be asked

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to make sure that the move to the cloud is successful.

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And in many cases, it's not an all or nothing proposition.

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You don't have to do it all at the same time, and you don't have to do it all.

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You can move strategic work, such as email and teams,

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and start having departmental collaboration, even, to make those things.

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But that's why we have a team like Jake's to go through and map this out.

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Because it is a specialized area that has evolved out of IT projects to really understand this.

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Yeah. So we see a lot of customers that move, they start with maybe email.

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They move their email to Office 365, and then they said,

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well, let's move into SharePoint and Microsoft Teams and OneDrive.

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Let's move to modern desktop.

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So that's a very natural migration to the cloud for customers to do.

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It works very well. It's a huge undertaking to do it all at once.

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So it's important to start laying the groundwork from the start,

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figuring out how you want to structure this thing one year, two year,

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three or five years out. And that all comes into your on-premises hardware.

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Like I said, talking about your servers that are expiring, your SANS that are expiring.

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You have Windows operating systems. Windows Server 2012 is out the door

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in a year and a half or just under that.

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Right? So all those things come into strategically planning your migration to the cloud.

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And how do we get there?

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So let's talk a little bit about Office 365 licensing and some cool features that you get with that.

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So we talked about Exchange.

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We talked about SharePoint and Teams and OneDrive.

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I think most people kind of know what that stuff does and things that take care of for us.

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There's also a lot of security features involved with that.

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Mobile device management, controlling what users can access and controlling which users can access

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that data and making sure your environment is secure.

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So when you move to the cloud, you want to make sure that we're positioning you

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safe and secure environment so that you don't have any breaches of your data.

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Right? It's one of the biggest things that we've seen an uptick in is our security team

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and securing these things down.

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So aside from just planning out how do we get there, it's securing our data

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and making sure we're secure once we're up there as well.

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But it can be done.

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And a lot of ways it's a lot easier and you have a lot more granularity and flexibility

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to secure these things in a cloud-based solution than you had on premise as well.

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So it's a little scary, but it's a good thing.

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And you just have to kind of know what you're doing to get structured correctly.

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Yeah, yeah, that's a security is a big part of this.

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And you hear both sides of those equations where certain customers feel there's a lack

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of security because they can't see it and touch it.

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And they're releasing control of their data by moving to the cloud.

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But in many cases, you look, you work with our security team and you look at security experts.

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It's actually considered to be a more secure environment.

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If you look at the resources and that are available on organizations such as Microsoft,

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the thousands of security specialists they have, the secured by design approach that it has,

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it's really difficult to match.

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And it's continuously in a continuous development cycle.

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So it's able to respond much quicker than on-site deployment adjustments

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to new modern threats as they evolve.

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Microsoft has integrated risk analysis into the 365, for example.

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I mean, you can run a report and understand your overall risk and point those out.

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And you eliminate other factors.

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When you do it on-premise, we're not only dealing with say an exchange server or a

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SharePoint server, we're dealing with a firewall and other access to it.

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So you got multiple points of entry that you have to try to secure to go through those things.

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And if you want to introduce multi-factor into that, you got yet another product.

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So there's a lot of moving parts to manage.

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And you also don't tend to have those specialists on-site to handle those things where 365 certainly can.

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So there's a big value to that.

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And the last year and a half, we saw a number of on-premise exchange vulnerabilities that

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had numbers zero days that were pretty significant

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and caused a lot of press around that side of it, whereas 365 was not affected,

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which is which is yet a good proof point of what we just said to kind of start off that

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security discussion. It is viewed as a more secure way to go.

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Yeah. Okay. So kind of reeling it back into budgeting a little bit.

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And what we have to look at is we're planning a migration out there.

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Like I said, there's a lot of different things that we've taken for it.

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So included with, let's say, a Microsoft Office 365 license, if you're to talk about like a business

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premium license, you get most all of those security features included in that suite.

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You get the capability doing email, file sharing, file storage, Microsoft Teams,

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communications, meetings. We can also do phone systems and Microsoft Teams now.

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All right. So we're pulling all that under one big platform.

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So you can have ease of use across your user base for using all these utilities.

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There's a lot of other third party solutions I have to think about as well.

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When it comes to your compliance requirements, we have some customers that need to do email

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encryption, archiving, and backup and spam filtering capabilities.

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Microsoft does have the capability doing a lot of these features.

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We have a lot of our customers use third party solutions as well.

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And those are subscription based models too.

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So all things to keep in mind as you're budgeting this out and planning this out are those

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additional add-ons that we need to think about.

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Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. And I know it gets asked from time to time,

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why not just keep it on Microsoft versus using those third parties you mentioned side with it.

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And it's usually about an overall functionality and ease of management side of it and kind of

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core line of business discussion side. I know we for email encryption, as you mentioned,

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Zikz is a common one. We usually find customers that prefer that particular product just because

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it has some value as far as this direct inbox to inbox over Microsoft's native side of it.

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So as Jake alluded to, it's just another discussion.

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Is there significant value in these third parties based on their management and other

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feature functions or other bundling services such as the backup to not have all your data

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all into the same provider? There's some strategic reasons to consider it.

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And it's just part of the overall budget discussion.

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All right. We've talked a lot about the software as a service solutions.

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Let's touch a little bit on infrastructure hosting capabilities because there's still going to be a

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need for Windows servers in a lot of capacity and with a lot of customers. And just because you need

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that Windows server doesn't mean you have to keep it in house as well. There's hosting solutions for

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hosting server based solutions in the cloud as well. Microsoft Azure is one that we work with a lot.

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Google AWS platform, things like that. So what we can do is spin up Windows servers in the cloud.

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Those are very scalable. So you can start with a minimum amount of resources that you need and

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you pay for what you consume on those. We're able to kind of price those out ahead of time and give

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a pretty good estimate as to what those costs are going to be on those types of resources.

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Not every resource can be moved to cloud based solutions as well. There are some things that

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require that physical connection, ports on the back of a server, things like that that you just

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can't move to a virtual cloud based solution. But you know, a lot of things you really can.

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So we just have to take a look at what all those items are that we need to host up there.

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How we want to structure that out. We design it, give an estimate as to what that monthly cost

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would be. You kind of move from there on your budgeting. So anything to add on that, Kyle?

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Yeah, yeah, there's a whole very large menu of services in that Azure space of just infrastructure,

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but also even just database or web or you know, so you can have your application just

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hosted in the cloud without the need for the server. The other part I really like on the

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Azure infrastructure, if you do do a Windows server or you do a database server there is the

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integration of the licensing into that monthly expense too. And that anybody who's ever worked

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with say Microsoft licensing knows it could be very confusing. And the old traditional model of

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saying how many users are accessing are we doing per users, per desktop, is it per CPU or core,

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you know, there's a lot to understand. And if you've ever had the unfortunate side of coming

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under Microsoft audit, you know, it's it's confusing. And then you have that unexpected

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expense because maybe you're under license if you weren't planning on it. This simplifies that

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because it's just it's part of the spend. You know, if you have a Windows server, the user cows are

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incorporated into that into that access license for it. So, you know, there's there's a far-reaching

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budget consideration again, just for that reason to do that as well. And obviously, it means that

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you're available for the current license version of Windows as well. So as you continue that spend,

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if you need to go to the newer version of Windows server that's available, you can do so.

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Yeah, yeah. And Microsoft does offer a lot of things for reserved instance licensing. You

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sign a commitment for X amount of terms and you get some cost savings on that monthly spend as well

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to lower that monthly expense too. So it's all stuff to look at. Great. Great. We could talk a

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little bit about you mentioned the modern desktop side of it. That's the other piece. We've talked

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about email, a little bit about database and teams and the collaboration, some of the files

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up with it. Active Directory for the user side of it is kind of the next frontier side of cloud

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services as Microsoft has been evolving, you know, identity management and those other components of

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of user repository, user permissions and user controls and device control sides of it in.

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And that's what they do at their endpoint manager and all, you know, slash in tune,

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a couple of different brand names it's known by nowadays. But as Jake mentioned, it's integrated

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into most Microsoft modern 365 licensing suite stuff on it. And customers moving to that, what

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Microsoft will call that is a modern desktop where it is fundamentally it's cloud joint. It

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doesn't require Active Directory to it. And if you, when we talked about that remote work side

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with it, the power here is, is the users are not by that Active Directory server. They're in their

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home, they're in a coffee shop, they're in a hotel, they could be anywhere in the world side with it.

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As long as they have internet connectivity, they are authenticated, they have policy and control

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and they're managed by, you know, the corporate policies and government, you know, and you can

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review the users and the device from a security standpoint and ensure they have access to the

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resources through that, which is really, you know, truly is a modern approach to that. And

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the way we would approach that to be from a budget standpoint is to start looking at new

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procurements of devices and start putting those on to the cloud joint. Why you still have Active

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Directory in place and start making that plan to make those moves to eventually in a, you know,

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two, three, three year time period that eventually would pull back on the need for the Active

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Directory. But it's, it's a plan and it's approach and that approach does work. You can coexist

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during that period of time until you've been able to make that full adjustment. And the easiest is

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when you buy new devices, you go with, they have a program called Autopilot, which will essentially

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make provision of those things an automatic thing where you can send an employee a desktop,

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they're automatically registered with your company's subscription, and they can log into that,

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open it out of the box, log in and have the apps pushed down to it, and then be able to continue

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to work. So very powerful, very, very impressive technology. Yeah, awesome. Works very well.

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And it's a lot of value. You get out of that Microsoft licensing. It may seem like a lot at

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first, but you're going to break apart the abilities that you have with that and all the

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different things that you can remove from your current expense list and utilize that one license

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set for it. You really, you really see the value inside of it. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

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Now, of course, moving to the cloud, we don't just flip a switch and it's there, right? We have to get

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that stuff there. So part of budgeting, moving to the cloud is of course the migration that you

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get there. The nice part about most of these migrations to the cloud, these software as a

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service solutions, these are kind of a one time migration, you don't have to worry about moving

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it again, right? You don't have to upgrade the server in five years and do another migration,

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spend the whole weekend working with your end users. So you have to look at migrating those

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across, getting that done at one time and migrating across is easier now than it used to be.

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Microsoft's come a long ways and made a lot easier to do that. So the things like hosted

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Windows servers in Azure, you still kind of have to plan out those upgrades, those operating system

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upgrades and those legacy application upgrades through the course of that lifespan of that

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database, those applications, but yeah, most things like your email suite, your share point,

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your teams, your OneDrive, you move from there and you don't have to worry about moving it again.

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Yeah, and even your office suite becomes auto-upgraded at that point, even to the full

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local installs, it's continuously streams and pushes the updates to it, so it isn't that whole lift.

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Yeah, we give it to the Windows operating system on your computers, moving to more of a smaller

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update-based cycle instead of doing Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 12, right?

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Yeah, yeah, very powerful. I mean, to minimize those touches and to get down to,

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you know, I think similarly, I like to compare it to like what we've come to know with our mobile

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devices, between our Apple phones and our Google phones and those other sides of those,

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of being able to just get a software update over the internet and boom, you have the new interface

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and you have the new system sides of it. The desktops are moving in a very, you know, they're

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coming together. It's pretty much getting to be this similar style of experience. Although

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you're in a corporate environment, you need to have policies of controls out of the same place

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so you can govern your risks and compliance needs where they apply.

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Yeah, lots of functionality. It feels like that's the way it should be though. In 2022,

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these things should be easier for end users and easier for us to manage and moving to

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cloud-based solutions is certainly making it that way. Yeah, I love many of the cloud services.

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One of the aspects you see evolve is a lot of self-service IT out of those sides, you know,

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and we're in the IT services business side of it. But even just to keep the users productive and

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being able to do things that require self-service password resets and being able to get through

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common techniques, in-tune being able to re-image a device without having to physically touch

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a device, you know, those things that are possible. So it's very, very efficient to allow users to

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stay productive without having to wait on a resource. And it keeps your IT resources then that

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on working online at business applications and business data, so they're actually helping the

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business, you know, grow and become better versus, you know, your standard maintenance work that,

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you know, can be very costly. All right. Let's see, any last budgeting tips or advice,

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yeah, Kyle, I think if I was to add any, we'd just be trying to consolidate these things together,

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get the most out of that licensing that you have. We see a lot of customers that have the capability

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to do much more and they're not doing it quite yet. They may be just some reluctancy to get to

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that point, but we can help you figure that out and it's a lot of value add and benefit to doing

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that. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's all about just planning, really, and then understanding that

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you don't have to do it all at once as well. But if you start now and you start having discussions

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and work, you know, a three-year plan is pretty typical side of those is you're looking at what's

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aging out and what's coming in, having that focus and that approach is going to make this a manageable

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process and you're, it'll allow for not only for you from a budgetary standpoint, costs and

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dollar spend, but also from the user impact side of it, which is a big part of this as well, to say

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you want to make this move, I want to do it in a cost-effective plan manner. Similarly, I can take

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my budget, roll into these new cloud services and then be able to train and slowly improve our

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collaboration for our company and our tools to improve and allow them to evolve for the next

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number of years. Customers that are able to manage and do that well, I think have a very, you know,

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extremely positive approach in feeling with the cloud and continue to see one and invest more and

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find ways to help them work better. Yeah, it's always fun to speak with customers that are, you

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know, reluctant to make that jump and can they release into it and then you do that touch base

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with them a month after the migration, six months after the migration, I like this is the best thing

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in the world. I'm so happy we moved here and trending towards that is a good thing. So

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over all the years you've done this, Jake, have you ever had any customers say move me back?

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Maybe one or two, but I'm actually surprised you say one or two. I've never had anybody go to it.

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That's always been a joke. I don't, yeah, I was thinking about that this morning. I don't think

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I really have had anybody move back. I've never done a non-premise migration back to exchange. Yeah,

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we we trend the other way and people love it and they're happy with it and they see the value in

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it. So yeah, yeah, that's that's been that's been my approach to it. Even the customers that were

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hesitant, like you mentioned beforehand, but they're after having the experience side with it. I

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have never heard them say that boy, I think that was a mistake. It's fun when you see customers

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that merge together, right? You get a company purchase and the company merges together and

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you get somebody from the parent company that comes in and says, oh, well, we don't have teams,

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we can't use this. And that really fast tracks the process and moving some of these things up there

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to really see the value that you get in this stuff and move towards it. So yeah, yep, yep. Once you

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get in there, you'll probably find you could never take it back because they'll wonder how we ever

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worked without it in the past. Well, thank you, Jake and Kyle. This was a great podcast on budgeting

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and migrating to the cloud. It seems to be too, there's a lot of efficiencies gained as well,

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with moving this into there. But as always, these guys love to talk and sometimes to be

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at hand at times, but let us know too out there. If you guys have any feedback for CIT by visiting

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cit-net.com or slash podcast or by emailing us at info at cit-net.com. And we look forward to chatting

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with you more next week. Thanks everyone. Thank you.