Thoughts on Digital Transformation and the Azure Stack
The main discourse, ever since I started working in the IT industry, is driving businesses forward in a climate of constant technology change. In any situation, resistance to change is fierce and it makes certain sense since a business goal is to achieve a comfortable market advantage and hold on to it while providing a better service than the competition.
The comfort zone is to be constantly challenged, as there may come someone like Uber or Netflix. Traditional thinking gets you in trouble at that point. The only certainty is… the disruptor is coming
Technology is one of the core ways companies can better serve customers and create experiences. As a web and mobile architect, it is an awesome responsibility.
With frequent production deployments and smaller development cycles, the pace is fast, and constant – but with that comes great opportunity for innovation, and core business transformation. A conversation that has a special meaning to the IT audience, particularly in the era of cloud computing.
Trusted scale and resiliency of Azure infrastructure, productivity tools and services with real hybrid capabilities are key to what I believe can help propel a business forward. I used them, seen them provide mission critical services reliably and at scale and am referring clients on their unavoidable digital transformation to this great experience in the cloud.
Mobile, Online, Connected Applications
Applications are central to every digital transformation strategy as businesses need to provide customer experiences rather than basic services.
To grow into this digital economy, attract new investment and connect with new businesses, I’m looking into great examples like Estonia, which is the first country to offer e-Residency – a transnational digital identity available to anyone interested in establishing and administering a location-independent business online. It is the type of thinking that can push everyone ahead as the customer is the new market maker sice businesses as well as governments have to tailor their services into seamless and enjoyable experiences.
One of the compelling and recent technologies that is helping in the modernization of applications is containers. And I can see first hand, the excitement and accomplishment this new technology provides to developers in my team.
Having received more attention from developers recently, containers are now accelerating application deployment and streamlining the way IT operations and development teams collaborate to deliver applications. Azure supports containers broadly, offering many options to deploy, from simple infrastructure to richly managed Azure Container Instances support for Windows Server in addition to Linux.
Azure Stack and the Hybrid Cloud
Almost all organisations I have engaged with, have a cloud strategy that is hybrid and all believe that hybrid cloud is a long-term approach. It makes for a natural and organised transition as hybrid cloud capabilities help you adopt the cloud without throwing away existing on premises infrastructure.
Microsoft’s hybrid cloud approach builds consistency between on-premises and the cloud. Consistency helps address the complexity of having to manage two different systems in two quite different ways. Azure Stack is providing that across identity, data, development, security and management.
Azure Security Center can also be used to secure workloads running on-premises and in other clouds. This is quite useful as your entire organisation is also secured with Active Directory that can be linked to the cloud or simply served from the cloud.
It’s an exciting time for IT, and our clients are our trusted partners in this era of digital transformation.
This are thoughts based on day to day business and development, I look forward to getting comments, questions or feedback so that we can further articulate these thoughts and empower organisations and people to comfortably achieve more.
