Welcome to today's CIT Tech for Business podcast.
Today, we're sitting down with Kyle and Jake to
kick off our IT budgeting series.
What we're going to be chatting about today is
budgeting for moving to the Cloud.
Let's start it off with you guys both
introducing yourself to our audience today.
Thanks, Tara. My name is Kyle Adam,
the President and CEO at CIT.
I've been with the organization now.
Going into 29 years.
Just love this topic.
Very passionate about Cloud and Cloud Services.
I am Jake Williamson.
I've been at CIT for about 10 years now,
and I'll lead up our Cloud Services Department.
I manage that team of field resources who do
project-based work surrounding what we're going to talk about today.
Thanks, Jake and Kyle. I appreciate that.
We're going to kick it off today by explaining the Cloud.
Tell me what that is.
The Cloud, awesome.
Has lots of different meanings depending on who you ask.
But everybody is using it at some degree today in some fashion.
The Cloud is really taking the IT resources that you use to
communicate to work, to access resources,
share files and work through things,
but hosting that on an externally hosted solution.
Managed in the Cloud.
Somewhere in a data center.
Probably in the United States,
somewhere near where you live,
but something that's not managed at your office anymore.
You don't have to carry the overhead of
the hardware and the software behind it.
Something you pay Microsoft to do that for you.
Yeah, just to add on that.
It's also usually associated from
a financial standpoint of a subscription-based service where
you're not outright purchasing software or hardware any longer,
but you're subscribing to
the service that is in the laws for that scalability side of it.
Jake mentioned on the Microsoft side, could be email.
But we all use it in our personal lives into services such as Spotify.
There's other areas where you're just consuming,
you just pay for the right to consume.
That's one of the biggest powers of
the Cloud services that are available out there.
It's just that scalability and the ability to adjust costs.
Awesome. Looking at our IT budgeting part of this,
that's what is the Cloud.
If somebody was looking to migrate into the Cloud,
what would that first step look like?
The first step is analyzing your current environment,
taking a look at what do you have for resources today.
Most customers are utilizing Cloud services across the board.
One thing we like to do is pull those together and utilize
a single source of licensing that can manage multiple aspects for you.
Let's take a look at your on-premise environment and look at how do we want to
build this thing out in the future?
How should we structure it for the long-term?
We want to handle the immediate needs,
but we also want to structure it off those long-term goals and get away from
the conventional architecture like we've been building it today.
Kyle, any thoughts on that?
Yeah. Again, I think it's also
aligned with the user impact side of that.
There's a training aspect to it with many customers.
As you get into these Cloud services,
you find there are bundling or
a lot of additional services that come along with it.
We're looking at Office 365.
It's a very common topic where they move to there for
email services is maybe where they started
in teams over the last few years with the pandemic side of that.
But then they come back and start to look at additional services such as
file storage with OneDrive and even
data analytics with Power BI and a number of different tools that are available.
There's a lot of additional services that users need to be introduced to.
There's new ways to work and collaborate that come with these services.
You want to take an approach to bring
the training aspect in there and at least get some understanding and start to have a plan.
It's never a boom, it's there.
It's a work in progress to get there.
But there's a tremendous value overall if you do take that approach to really
holistically look at your workflows and your collaboration and your other areas.
Because you're paying that expense and you can really drive the most value by leveraging those areas.
So it's quite a feat to take what you have today and figure out,
okay, how do we get to the Cloud?
You want to get there, right?
That's what we spend most of our time talking with customers on,
as what is the first step and how do we start introducing the Cloud into their environment.
A lot of customers are already there to some degree, right?
We've touched that a couple of times.
So really stepping back, taking a look at their on-premise environment.
What are they using today?
How can we take these?
Will these a Cloud-based solutions?
One thing that's used quite a bit is a term called Software as a Service,
where you're actually paying a company to host your email for you,
host your Microsoft Teams,
your OneDrive, your SharePoint storage, things like that.
Where you can get away from having an on-premise SharePoint server,
an on-premise Exchange server, a file server for managing these things.
So you take a look at everything they have in your organization
and how your end users are able to work today,
and you start structuring that out and basing that up in a Cloud-based solution for you.
So you can start minimizing that onsite overhead that you've been carrying today.
That's going back to the budget topic side with that.
The impact to the budgeting side of those is no longer having to do the five-year pre-purchase
of storage and servers,
and even from your, if you have IT onsite support,
or even outside support,
typically Exchange and those other side in SharePoint,
those are large service-based products for onsite.
They require quite a bit of administration.
They require data backups, not only for the storage,
but also for the recovery and those things.
So there's ramifications of the impact to the overall budget
that really starts coming to play that are no longer necessary,
because they're just part of that monthly reoccurring or annual spend.
Yeah. One thing to think about too is the amount of workforce that's working remotely now too.
We're not all working inside of the office anymore,
or we have to access the files that are sitting right down the hallway in the server closet.
We need to be able to access these things from home,
from all sorts of locations.
A lot of companies are hiring staff that are working in other states, CIT included.
We have people all across the country.
So we're able to utilize these utilities to make their ability to work even easier for them,
and keeps it secure.
We're knocking down holes that are open into the environment by securing them through
third-party cloud-based solutions,
and we're able to put security and structure around that too.
Yeah. I think that's a great point.
And again, we talked about that in a brief way going through that.
But there's been a lot of client requests.
There certainly was over the last two years to make accessibility to the systems
and the collaboration tools and how they do their job.
And many customers that had to deal with VPNs, it was problematic.
Not only from scalability to suddenly having going from a few users needing to remote access
to an entire workforce, presented a lot of scalability challenges, accessibility, and
data access, where customers that were on a cloud platform were more mature side with it.
It was far more seamless, and the impact of the business was greatly minimized,
and a lot of her tremendous flexibility with that.
So that's a tremendous point, Jake, to get to,
is just that accessibility with a work-anywhere-style technology that the cloud services really provide.
Yeah. So I think we've identified quite a few reasons as to why we should move to the cloud, right?
And services that are managed in the cloud that would be beneficial to most customers.
Now, we talk about the fun part of moving to the cloud, and that's designing it.
Right? I know that's my favorite part. I don't know about you, kind of.
I think you enjoy designing it, too.
Yeah. Yeah. It is a lot of fun.
Again, it is the understanding and spending time to learn how users work and where all your data lives
and how they interact. Jake alluded to this earlier.
There's a lot of work and a lot of discussions that really need to happen,
because people have become comfortable and just creatures of habit,
knowing and just assuming things to work.
But we hear that often to say, I want to move my file server to the cloud.
And it's just not as simple as moving the files.
Obviously, there's a tremendous impact to the workflow of the users that need to be analyzed,
as well as obviously the types of files and how they're using the files and the engineering drawings.
Is it Word or Excel and PowerPoint or typical, clever files?
There's a lot there. There's a lot of questions to be asked
to make sure that the move to the cloud is successful.
And in many cases, it's not an all or nothing proposition.
You don't have to do it all at the same time, and you don't have to do it all.
You can move strategic work, such as email and teams,
and start having departmental collaboration, even, to make those things.
But that's why we have a team like Jake's to go through and map this out.
Because it is a specialized area that has evolved out of IT projects to really understand this.
Yeah. So we see a lot of customers that move, they start with maybe email.
They move their email to Office 365, and then they said,
well, let's move into SharePoint and Microsoft Teams and OneDrive.
Let's move to modern desktop.
So that's a very natural migration to the cloud for customers to do.
It works very well. It's a huge undertaking to do it all at once.
So it's important to start laying the groundwork from the start,
figuring out how you want to structure this thing one year, two year,
three or five years out. And that all comes into your on-premises hardware.
Like I said, talking about your servers that are expiring, your SANS that are expiring.
You have Windows operating systems. Windows Server 2012 is out the door
in a year and a half or just under that.
Right? So all those things come into strategically planning your migration to the cloud.
And how do we get there?
So let's talk a little bit about Office 365 licensing and some cool features that you get with that.
So we talked about Exchange.
We talked about SharePoint and Teams and OneDrive.
I think most people kind of know what that stuff does and things that take care of for us.
There's also a lot of security features involved with that.
Mobile device management, controlling what users can access and controlling which users can access
that data and making sure your environment is secure.
So when you move to the cloud, you want to make sure that we're positioning you
safe and secure environment so that you don't have any breaches of your data.
Right? It's one of the biggest things that we've seen an uptick in is our security team
and securing these things down.
So aside from just planning out how do we get there, it's securing our data
and making sure we're secure once we're up there as well.
But it can be done.
And a lot of ways it's a lot easier and you have a lot more granularity and flexibility
to secure these things in a cloud-based solution than you had on premise as well.
So it's a little scary, but it's a good thing.
And you just have to kind of know what you're doing to get structured correctly.
Yeah, yeah, that's a security is a big part of this.
And you hear both sides of those equations where certain customers feel there's a lack
of security because they can't see it and touch it.
And they're releasing control of their data by moving to the cloud.
But in many cases, you look, you work with our security team and you look at security experts.
It's actually considered to be a more secure environment.
If you look at the resources and that are available on organizations such as Microsoft,
the thousands of security specialists they have, the secured by design approach that it has,
it's really difficult to match.
And it's continuously in a continuous development cycle.
So it's able to respond much quicker than on-site deployment adjustments
to new modern threats as they evolve.
Microsoft has integrated risk analysis into the 365, for example.
I mean, you can run a report and understand your overall risk and point those out.
And you eliminate other factors.
When you do it on-premise, we're not only dealing with say an exchange server or a
SharePoint server, we're dealing with a firewall and other access to it.
So you got multiple points of entry that you have to try to secure to go through those things.
And if you want to introduce multi-factor into that, you got yet another product.
So there's a lot of moving parts to manage.
And you also don't tend to have those specialists on-site to handle those things where 365 certainly can.
So there's a big value to that.
And the last year and a half, we saw a number of on-premise exchange vulnerabilities that
had numbers zero days that were pretty significant
and caused a lot of press around that side of it, whereas 365 was not affected,
which is which is yet a good proof point of what we just said to kind of start off that
security discussion. It is viewed as a more secure way to go.
Yeah. Okay. So kind of reeling it back into budgeting a little bit.
And what we have to look at is we're planning a migration out there.
Like I said, there's a lot of different things that we've taken for it.
So included with, let's say, a Microsoft Office 365 license, if you're to talk about like a business
premium license, you get most all of those security features included in that suite.
You get the capability doing email, file sharing, file storage, Microsoft Teams,
communications, meetings. We can also do phone systems and Microsoft Teams now.
All right. So we're pulling all that under one big platform.
So you can have ease of use across your user base for using all these utilities.
There's a lot of other third party solutions I have to think about as well.
When it comes to your compliance requirements, we have some customers that need to do email
encryption, archiving, and backup and spam filtering capabilities.
Microsoft does have the capability doing a lot of these features.
We have a lot of our customers use third party solutions as well.
And those are subscription based models too.
So all things to keep in mind as you're budgeting this out and planning this out are those
additional add-ons that we need to think about.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. And I know it gets asked from time to time,
why not just keep it on Microsoft versus using those third parties you mentioned side with it.
And it's usually about an overall functionality and ease of management side of it and kind of
core line of business discussion side. I know we for email encryption, as you mentioned,
Zikz is a common one. We usually find customers that prefer that particular product just because
it has some value as far as this direct inbox to inbox over Microsoft's native side of it.
So as Jake alluded to, it's just another discussion.
Is there significant value in these third parties based on their management and other
feature functions or other bundling services such as the backup to not have all your data
all into the same provider? There's some strategic reasons to consider it.
And it's just part of the overall budget discussion.
All right. We've talked a lot about the software as a service solutions.
Let's touch a little bit on infrastructure hosting capabilities because there's still going to be a
need for Windows servers in a lot of capacity and with a lot of customers. And just because you need
that Windows server doesn't mean you have to keep it in house as well. There's hosting solutions for
hosting server based solutions in the cloud as well. Microsoft Azure is one that we work with a lot.
Google AWS platform, things like that. So what we can do is spin up Windows servers in the cloud.
Those are very scalable. So you can start with a minimum amount of resources that you need and
you pay for what you consume on those. We're able to kind of price those out ahead of time and give
a pretty good estimate as to what those costs are going to be on those types of resources.
Not every resource can be moved to cloud based solutions as well. There are some things that
require that physical connection, ports on the back of a server, things like that that you just
can't move to a virtual cloud based solution. But you know, a lot of things you really can.
So we just have to take a look at what all those items are that we need to host up there.
How we want to structure that out. We design it, give an estimate as to what that monthly cost
would be. You kind of move from there on your budgeting. So anything to add on that, Kyle?
Yeah, yeah, there's a whole very large menu of services in that Azure space of just infrastructure,
but also even just database or web or you know, so you can have your application just
hosted in the cloud without the need for the server. The other part I really like on the
Azure infrastructure, if you do do a Windows server or you do a database server there is the
integration of the licensing into that monthly expense too. And that anybody who's ever worked
with say Microsoft licensing knows it could be very confusing. And the old traditional model of
saying how many users are accessing are we doing per users, per desktop, is it per CPU or core,
you know, there's a lot to understand. And if you've ever had the unfortunate side of coming
under Microsoft audit, you know, it's it's confusing. And then you have that unexpected
expense because maybe you're under license if you weren't planning on it. This simplifies that
because it's just it's part of the spend. You know, if you have a Windows server, the user cows are
incorporated into that into that access license for it. So, you know, there's there's a far-reaching
budget consideration again, just for that reason to do that as well. And obviously, it means that
you're available for the current license version of Windows as well. So as you continue that spend,
if you need to go to the newer version of Windows server that's available, you can do so.
Yeah, yeah. And Microsoft does offer a lot of things for reserved instance licensing. You
sign a commitment for X amount of terms and you get some cost savings on that monthly spend as well
to lower that monthly expense too. So it's all stuff to look at. Great. Great. We could talk a
little bit about you mentioned the modern desktop side of it. That's the other piece. We've talked
about email, a little bit about database and teams and the collaboration, some of the files
up with it. Active Directory for the user side of it is kind of the next frontier side of cloud
services as Microsoft has been evolving, you know, identity management and those other components of
of user repository, user permissions and user controls and device control sides of it in.
And that's what they do at their endpoint manager and all, you know, slash in tune,
a couple of different brand names it's known by nowadays. But as Jake mentioned, it's integrated
into most Microsoft modern 365 licensing suite stuff on it. And customers moving to that, what
Microsoft will call that is a modern desktop where it is fundamentally it's cloud joint. It
doesn't require Active Directory to it. And if you, when we talked about that remote work side
with it, the power here is, is the users are not by that Active Directory server. They're in their
home, they're in a coffee shop, they're in a hotel, they could be anywhere in the world side with it.
As long as they have internet connectivity, they are authenticated, they have policy and control
and they're managed by, you know, the corporate policies and government, you know, and you can
review the users and the device from a security standpoint and ensure they have access to the
resources through that, which is really, you know, truly is a modern approach to that. And
the way we would approach that to be from a budget standpoint is to start looking at new
procurements of devices and start putting those on to the cloud joint. Why you still have Active
Directory in place and start making that plan to make those moves to eventually in a, you know,
two, three, three year time period that eventually would pull back on the need for the Active
Directory. But it's, it's a plan and it's approach and that approach does work. You can coexist
during that period of time until you've been able to make that full adjustment. And the easiest is
when you buy new devices, you go with, they have a program called Autopilot, which will essentially
make provision of those things an automatic thing where you can send an employee a desktop,
they're automatically registered with your company's subscription, and they can log into that,
open it out of the box, log in and have the apps pushed down to it, and then be able to continue
to work. So very powerful, very, very impressive technology. Yeah, awesome. Works very well.
And it's a lot of value. You get out of that Microsoft licensing. It may seem like a lot at
first, but you're going to break apart the abilities that you have with that and all the
different things that you can remove from your current expense list and utilize that one license
set for it. You really, you really see the value inside of it. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Now, of course, moving to the cloud, we don't just flip a switch and it's there, right? We have to get
that stuff there. So part of budgeting, moving to the cloud is of course the migration that you
get there. The nice part about most of these migrations to the cloud, these software as a
service solutions, these are kind of a one time migration, you don't have to worry about moving
it again, right? You don't have to upgrade the server in five years and do another migration,
spend the whole weekend working with your end users. So you have to look at migrating those
across, getting that done at one time and migrating across is easier now than it used to be.
Microsoft's come a long ways and made a lot easier to do that. So the things like hosted
Windows servers in Azure, you still kind of have to plan out those upgrades, those operating system
upgrades and those legacy application upgrades through the course of that lifespan of that
database, those applications, but yeah, most things like your email suite, your share point,
your teams, your OneDrive, you move from there and you don't have to worry about moving it again.
Yeah, and even your office suite becomes auto-upgraded at that point, even to the full
local installs, it's continuously streams and pushes the updates to it, so it isn't that whole lift.
Yeah, we give it to the Windows operating system on your computers, moving to more of a smaller
update-based cycle instead of doing Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 12, right?
Yeah, yeah, very powerful. I mean, to minimize those touches and to get down to,
you know, I think similarly, I like to compare it to like what we've come to know with our mobile
devices, between our Apple phones and our Google phones and those other sides of those,
of being able to just get a software update over the internet and boom, you have the new interface
and you have the new system sides of it. The desktops are moving in a very, you know, they're
coming together. It's pretty much getting to be this similar style of experience. Although
you're in a corporate environment, you need to have policies of controls out of the same place
so you can govern your risks and compliance needs where they apply.
Yeah, lots of functionality. It feels like that's the way it should be though. In 2022,
these things should be easier for end users and easier for us to manage and moving to
cloud-based solutions is certainly making it that way. Yeah, I love many of the cloud services.
One of the aspects you see evolve is a lot of self-service IT out of those sides, you know,
and we're in the IT services business side of it. But even just to keep the users productive and
being able to do things that require self-service password resets and being able to get through
common techniques, in-tune being able to re-image a device without having to physically touch
a device, you know, those things that are possible. So it's very, very efficient to allow users to
stay productive without having to wait on a resource. And it keeps your IT resources then that
on working online at business applications and business data, so they're actually helping the
business, you know, grow and become better versus, you know, your standard maintenance work that,
you know, can be very costly. All right. Let's see, any last budgeting tips or advice,
yeah, Kyle, I think if I was to add any, we'd just be trying to consolidate these things together,
get the most out of that licensing that you have. We see a lot of customers that have the capability
to do much more and they're not doing it quite yet. They may be just some reluctancy to get to
that point, but we can help you figure that out and it's a lot of value add and benefit to doing
that. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's all about just planning, really, and then understanding that
you don't have to do it all at once as well. But if you start now and you start having discussions
and work, you know, a three-year plan is pretty typical side of those is you're looking at what's
aging out and what's coming in, having that focus and that approach is going to make this a manageable
process and you're, it'll allow for not only for you from a budgetary standpoint, costs and
dollar spend, but also from the user impact side of it, which is a big part of this as well, to say
you want to make this move, I want to do it in a cost-effective plan manner. Similarly, I can take
my budget, roll into these new cloud services and then be able to train and slowly improve our
collaboration for our company and our tools to improve and allow them to evolve for the next
number of years. Customers that are able to manage and do that well, I think have a very, you know,
extremely positive approach in feeling with the cloud and continue to see one and invest more and
find ways to help them work better. Yeah, it's always fun to speak with customers that are, you
know, reluctant to make that jump and can they release into it and then you do that touch base
with them a month after the migration, six months after the migration, I like this is the best thing
in the world. I'm so happy we moved here and trending towards that is a good thing. So
over all the years you've done this, Jake, have you ever had any customers say move me back?
Maybe one or two, but I'm actually surprised you say one or two. I've never had anybody go to it.
That's always been a joke. I don't, yeah, I was thinking about that this morning. I don't think
I really have had anybody move back. I've never done a non-premise migration back to exchange. Yeah,
we we trend the other way and people love it and they're happy with it and they see the value in
it. So yeah, yeah, that's that's been that's been my approach to it. Even the customers that were
hesitant, like you mentioned beforehand, but they're after having the experience side with it. I
have never heard them say that boy, I think that was a mistake. It's fun when you see customers
that merge together, right? You get a company purchase and the company merges together and
you get somebody from the parent company that comes in and says, oh, well, we don't have teams,
we can't use this. And that really fast tracks the process and moving some of these things up there
to really see the value that you get in this stuff and move towards it. So yeah, yep, yep. Once you
get in there, you'll probably find you could never take it back because they'll wonder how we ever
worked without it in the past. Well, thank you, Jake and Kyle. This was a great podcast on budgeting
and migrating to the cloud. It seems to be too, there's a lot of efficiencies gained as well,
with moving this into there. But as always, these guys love to talk and sometimes to be
at hand at times, but let us know too out there. If you guys have any feedback for CIT by visiting
cit-net.com or slash podcast or by emailing us at info at cit-net.com. And we look forward to chatting
with you more next week. Thanks everyone. Thank you.