In this blog post, we’ll examine the obstacles preventing many organizations from launching an SAP S/4HANA migration, especially when migrating from an existing system on-premises to the cloud. 

SAP S/4HANA in the Cloud: What’s Holding You Back?

Migrating workloads to the cloud lies at the heart of the digital transformation strategy for many enterprises. The latest Cloud Computing Study from IDG found that 81% of organizations house at least some applications in the cloud. 

By late 2021, 59% of enterprises plan to house the majority or all of their workloads in the cloud. Only 5% plan not to leverage any cloud-based resources. Given the importance of digital transformation to business processes and today’s digital business models, we’ll see how long this tiny minority can hold out.

The study didn’t report on which workloads were still on-premises for these organizations, but it’s a safe bet many of them involve heavily integrated ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. In a corporate fact sheet dated August 2020, SAP claimed that 77% of all business transactions worldwide touch an SAP system. 

With so many touchpoints throughout the enterprise and into the supply chain, migrating to a cloud-based ERP software system is one of the most challenging digital transformation initiatives an enterprise can undertake. It’s understandable if SAP users haven’t yet jumped at the opportunity to migrate their core ERP to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud.

Also read: How SAP S/4HANA Fuels ERP Digital Transformation 

Here are three obstacles that often cause business and IT leaders to think twice about moving SAP S/4HANA workloads to the cloud.  

1. Platform launch-related delays

SAP S/4HANA was first released in 2015. Early on, confusion regarding the migration path created some hesitancy. SAP also said they would be discontinuing support for SAP ECC, the predecessor to S/4HANA, in 2025.  

Later, the date was changed to the end of 2027, with the option to pay higher maintenance premiums to receive support through 2030.

This gave users a little breathing room but also a reason to delay data migration planning. Still, experienced SAP administrators know the clock is ticking. Migrating to a new version of SAP can be a multi-year proposition. To go live before support ends, they will need to kick off a migration planning project soon. 

2. SAP Cloud concerns

SAP solutions include a SaaS version of S/4HANA. This can be deployed in an SAP single or multitenant cloud. While SAP is the undisputed leader in ERP solutions, not every business or IT leader is ready to trust them with their cloud environment. For example, those organizations that leverage multiple clouds might have concerns about connectivity and latency between an SAP-managed cloud and dependent solutions running on AWS or Azure.  

SAP’s cloud offerings have also created some concerns over control of the environment and applications. In an SAP cloud, the vendor maintains control over when new releases and upgrades are implemented. This can create concerns for enterprises when they have non-SAP business systems tightly integrated to their ERP backbone. Without the time to test the impact of a new release, they could find themselves scrambling to restore these connections. 

3. Gap in talent and resources

SAP S/4HANA can also be deployed in a hyperscale cloud environment, like AWS, or in a proprietary cloud. However, these options require the enterprise to have both application, user experience, and environment expertise. It’s rare to find an in-house IT team with those skill sets, especially for an ERP system that’s been completely rearchitected.

Businesses often ask themselves: Has my team migrated an SAP instance before? Can my team manage a Brownfield or Greenfield deployment? Would my deployment require a third-party provider’s assistance?

In addition, unless using a third-party data center, a proprietary cloud deployment carries with it the same overhead burden as any other on-premises deployment. Most organizations migrate to the cloud to reduce or eliminate costs such as facility maintenance, investments in hardware, and staff expenses. 

Brownfield vs. Greenfield: What’s the difference?

SAP S/4HANA migration projects typically fit into one of three types: 

• Greenfield approach – This is one in which the organization is migrating from a non-SAP ERP application.  
• Brownfield approach – A brownfield migration refers to a migration from SAP ECC to S/4HANA in which existing datasets are migrated. 
• There is a third option that goes even deeper called Selective Data Transition. This usually refers to a migration in which the company is an existing SAP customer (like SAP HANA or ECC), but the SAP implementation is fresh. In this migration path, only select data sets are migrated.  

Also read: Top 5 SAP ERP Challenges for IT Organizations 

Plan for and overcome SAP migration risks

Migrating to SAP S/4HANA requires planning, and application, and environmental expertise. Unfortunately, many organizations that provide SAP migration services focus on one or the other. Working with a managed service provider helps organizations overcome many of the risks of an SAP migration and ongoing management of their production environment. Providers work closely with your internal team to help overcome bandwidth issues and skill set gaps.  

List of questions to ask for your SAP S/4HANA migration

During your migration planning phase, you need to answer these vital migration questions:

• Is this the right time to upgrade?
• Do we have the right system architecture for a smooth implementation and adoption?
• Will our data migrate as is? Or do we need to scrub/recreate some data sets?
• Should the migration be completed in phases?
• How long will it take to complete, and what are the milestones?
• How much downtime should we expect? How can we minimize the impact on business operations? 
• How will we keep our data secure during the migration? How will we keep it secure once we go live?

By nature, ERP migrations are a project that involves many different individuals with unique skill sets from across the organization. Ensuring vital responsibilities are covered and assigning people to the right roles is essential to an effective, surprise-free transition. 

TierPoint’s SAP Managed Services for S/4HANA offering is an innovative and comprehensive solution for the modern enterprise that combines a best-in-class, high-availability private cloud platform with SAP Managed Cloud expertise. Managed SAP S/4HANA provides the benefits of the cloud (converting CapEx to OpEx, lowering overhead, reducing IT burden, real-time monitoring, etc.) combined with greater flexibility and control over your environment as well as expert SAP and cloud services.  

To learn more about Managed SAP S/4HANA and our other managed services offerings, visit us on the web. You can also download our Managed SAP S/4HANA fact sheet and schedule a consultation with one of our SAP migration specialists. 

How cloud migration helps control cloud spend

These best practices are designed to help you avoid issues that can drive up cloud costs. They are focused on the kinds of missteps I see most often in cloud migration projects. 

1. Identify infrastructure issues early

My most memorable example of an infrastructure issue was with a customer in Europe that wanted to migrate workloads to our data center in New York. They had planned out exactly how they wanted to get it done and by when. Unfortunately, they hadn’t considered the lack of connectivity and the slow internet speeds in their geography. They would have been transmitting data for months (well past their target go-live date) had we not intervened to suggest a better way.

2. Assess your skillset honestly

Since migrating workloads to the cloud has become easier, many business leaders just assume their in-house staff can manage the project. Maybe they can, but if they’re new to a platform or don’t have the bandwidth, augmenting internal resources with external expertise saves everyone from a lot of headaches.

Also read: How to Assemble Your Cloud Strategy Team 

3. Look at applications realistically

Is your ERP system really ready for a private cloud or public cloud services? Or does it need to be refactored or replaced to ensure data security, performance, and compatibility with platforms? Are you able to move to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) model? 

Migrating a monolithic, data-intensive, and mission-critical application like ERP is challenging enough. The last thing you need is to decide mid-migration that the application will create more problems in the cloud than it’s worth. This is especially a big concern for businesses using ERP for supply chain management. 

Also read: 5 Decisions to Make Before Moving to the Cloud 

4. Plan for the migration holistically

So, you’ve decided to leave one of your legacy applications on-premises while you migrate more cloud-ready applications. Make sure you understand the interdependencies between applications, so you don’t break any essential connections during the move. When we work with migration customers, we use a special tool to assess interdependencies and then group the migration project into phases to ensure nothing gets broken in the process.

5. Factor in the human element

One of the costs that I see underestimated time and time again is the human cost. Generally speaking, planning a cloud migration strategy is a big job that can last for months. Depending on their role, staff can find it challenging to do their “day job” while also working on the migration project. And, because the actual migration work is often done on nights and weekends, it may not be feasible for some to work the extra hours. 

6. Create a cloud governance framework

Ignoring your cloud resources can create all kinds of headaches – cost, performance, security, compliance, unplanned downtime, cloud sprawl, etc. A cloud governance framework covers the policies and practices you will use to ensure your cloud continues to meet your objectives.

Cloud Readiness Assessments augment cloud migration best practices

A well-planned migration project can help you control migration costs, as well as ongoing monthly costs. A Cloud Readiness Assessment is the first step. 

The readiness assessment can help you control costs in many ways. Here are just five: 

Uncover unforeseen obstacles

Easily the most dangerous obstacles in any migration project are the ones you don’t see ahead of time, and therefore, can’t plan for. These obstacles often require you to backtrack the migration, redo work already completed, and sometimes even start from scratch. The Cloud Readiness Assessment looks at people, business processes, and infrastructure to ensure that everything is in alignment. 

Align IT to the business

What are your cloud migration objectives? When we ask this question of IT and business leadership, we often get very different responses. This can lead to poor decision-making, not because those involved didn’t know what they were doing, but because they had different end goals in mind. Gaining alignment is a core goal of the Cloud Readiness Assessment.

Build a better business case

Our Cloud Readiness Assessments typically include a cost/benefit analysis to help you build the business case for your cloud strategy. A natural benefit of this data-driven analysis is an estimate of migration costs as well as monthly costs. 

Identify cost savings opportunities

During the Cloud Readiness Assessment, we’ll work with you to evaluate your cloud usage and validate your choice of cloud platforms. As part of the assessment, we’ll also help you identify specific cloud features, like edge computing, that can help with cost optimization.

Create cloud visibility

Visibility isn’t a cost savings benefit, but it can help you budget appropriately for each phase of the migration. Laying out the roadmap during the Cloud Readiness Assessment helps ensure everyone knows what to expect and when. 

We can help you with your cloud migration

Even if you plan to handle every aspect of your migration project in-house, it helps to work with managed services provider, like TierPoint. Because we’ve managed hundreds of migration projects, chances are good we will spot pitfalls your internal team can’t see. Learn more about Cloud Migration services. Not ready for a cloud assessment? If you’re looking for insight to help fine-tune or validate your cloud strategy, consider a complimentary cloud workshop. 

The major challenges businesses face when managing SAP ERP

Enterprises choose SAP because the product has the functionality they need for business operations. This is borne out in Software Review’s April 2021 Data Quadrant, which classifies SAP S/4HANA as a product innovator, thanks to its high ranking for product features and customer satisfaction. What keeps SAP S/4HANA from being classified as a Leader in Software Review’s April 2021 Data Quadrant is its fairly low rating for vendor experience and capabilities. 

This underscores an undeniable truth anyone who’s ever implemented an ERP system, like SAP S/4HANA (or SAP ECC previously), knows ERP functionality can only take you so far. Eventually, the capabilities of the implementer/service provider – whether that’s SAP or a third-party – have a significant effect on the success of the implementation. Here are five challenges we see most often in our work hosting instances of SAP S/4HANA: 

Challenge #1 – The instance of SAP is not customized for the enterprise

Just because you can customize an ERP application doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. This is especially true of a functional leader in the ERP space like SAP. In fact, the more customizable a solution is, the easier it is to misconfigure it, which can lead to application failures and IT security issues. And once configured, the system may need to be recalibrated to the needs of the business with every release of a new version or enhancement. 

Challenge #2 – SAP requires specific skills to architect, implement, and optimize

A mission-critical SAP business application will test every element of your IT from infrastructure, to application architecture, to cloud services, and beyond. It’s highly likely that your SAP implementation also includes other application dependencies, such as a third-party CRM or supply chain planning application, that will need to be accounted for during implementation and with every upgrade. 

Challenge #3 – SAP requires too many IT resources for day-to-day management

ERP systems have a lot of moving parts, and SAP S/4HANA is certainly no exception. Keeping up with the technical requirements of SAP S/4HANA can be a full-time job in itself. Then there are the day-to-day application requirements. For example, the very nature of the data housed in an ERP system makes it an attractive target for data thieves as well as other types of cyberattacks, including ransomware and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).  

Implementing patches as quickly as possible is one element of a defense-in-depth IT security strategy. Unfortunately, with so much on their plate, it’s easy for ERP systems administrators to delay patching while they’re handling “more immediate” challenges. 

Challenge #4 – Hardware obsolescence has an impact on SAP performance

Hardware plays a significant role in solution performance. Unfortunately for many enterprises, it’s challenging at best to gauge capacity requirements. They don’t want to tie up capital by overinvesting in hardware, but an IT team that’s stretched thin may not notice when SAP performance begins to degrade due to capacity issues. Just as detrimental to the business, your organization may not be able to scale up IT infrastructure fast enough to take advantage of a sudden, unexpected market opportunity. 

Challenge #5 – SAP doesn’t operate in a vacuum

When a mission-critical SAP system goes down, the company goes down. However, unplanned downtime isn’t always a function of the application or the vendor. It can be caused by the environment, such as when a provider loses connectivity, or an untested disaster recovery plan fails just when you need it. 

Managed SAP S/4HANA: The best of both worlds

At TierPoint, we have the skills and infrastructure to help you address all five of these challenges. We teamed up with NTT DATA Business Solutions, an SAP Global Platinum Partner, to provide an even deeper array of managed services for our enterprise customers. With the TierPoint and NTT DATA Business Solutions  Managed SAP S/4HANA solution, you’ll get: 

• A high-performing, secure private cloud environment
• Expert assistance implementing and configuring SAP to meet the needs of your business
• Ongoing monitoring of your SAP environment and instances to ensure optimal performance and availability 
• IT architectural expertise and regular hardware refreshes so you don’t need to worry about hardware-induced performance issues
• Day-to-day management of your SAP environment and instances (e.g., patching, updating, maintenance) so you can focus on more strategic IT initiatives 

To learn more about how our Managed SAP offerings can help your IT organization, reach out to one of our service representatives.

Why Pennsylvania for a data center?

When developing a data center location strategy and selecting a data center location, it’s not always about what the location offers. Just as often, it’s what the location doesn’t have that makes it suitable for housing sensitive workloads and meeting high-availability computing needs. Pennsylvania is one such location:

• Not a very seismically active part of the country.
• Surrounded by hills, thus less likelihood of tornados.
• Not as susceptible to flooding as other parts of the country

Population density within Pennsylvania is also low compared to many other Northeastern states. Philadelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania (1.5M people), but the number of people per square mile is less than half that of New York City. Especially when coupled with a high volume of business traffic, bandwidth used by consumers in a densely populated area can put a strain on network availability. For businesses that need reliable connectivity and lots of bandwidth, low population density is a big benefit.

While less populated, Pennsylvania is still very close to major centers of business. Three of the major markets served by Pennsylvania data centers include New York City, Baltimore, and the District of Columbia. The furthest commute from some of the popular Pennsylvania data center locations to these major metros is just over three hours; the shortest is less than an hour.

Businesses that choose to colocate will typically own (or lease) their hardware and often take all or most of the day-to-day responsibility for managing it. It’s very important to these companies that the data center is within a relatively easy commute. Distance is also a critical factor when choosing a disaster recovery site. They want their disaster recovery data center to be close enough to visit if they need to, but far enough away that it remains unaffected by a regional disruption.

The benefits of Pennsylvania for data center colocation

We’ve talked about the benefits of housing your data in a Pennsylvania data center. Let’s now turn to how a colocation facility in Pennsylvania can help meet some of an organization’s other critical requirements.

Security and compliance

Companies that choose colocation services are often trying to balance security and compliance with cost structure. They want to decommission their on-premises data center and convert at least some of their CapEx into OpEx. However, maintaining responsibility for the hardware they own or lease gives them a better sense of control.

Online gaming is another type of business served by Pennsylvania data centers. Dave Callan, TierPoint’s V.P. of Sales for the Atlantic Region recently wrote about how colocating equipment in Pennsylvania can help these businesses achieve their IT goals. Read his full blog post here: Online Gaming in PA: Finding the Right Data Center Provider

High availability and low latency

Many hospitals and major financial institutions choose to house their equipment in data centers located in Pennsylvania. These organizations have high availability requirements, and they need low latency connections so they can create a better customer experience. All of the benefits of housing workloads in a Pennsylvania data center that we have already mentioned are vitally important to them.

Managed Services

Banks and hospitals also have stringent compliance and security requirements, and they often feel most comfortable taking a hands-on approach to their hardware. Data center colocation in Pennsylvania gives organizations like these the best of both worlds. Data center providers often offer additional managed services, remote hands, and IT security monitoring, to help fill gaps when staff can’t be there in person.

Business Continuity options

Business continuity workspace is another benefit of data center colocation with a provider. Data center providers often allocate hundreds of seats and meeting room space for clients to use in the event of a disaster.

During COVID-19, many businesses were forced to rethink their work-from-home policies, and they discovered it was possible to send at least a portion of their workforce home. However, a different type of disaster could quickly impact connectivity to the home, and business continuity workspace gives these employees a place to go.

Our five key Pennsylvania colocation data center regions

In our experience, we found these regions to be the best data center locations for our clients. Here are some of the benefits:

Valley Forge

Our Valley Forge data center houses over 600 clients in a 137K square foot facility and offers every product in our portfolio. While many of these customers house their primary workloads in Valley Forge, the data center is also used as a recovery site for many businesses based in Baltimore.

Allentown

Our Allentown-TekPark data center, at 122K square feet, is often the choice for our D.C. clients. Although it’s a little further away than Baltimore, TekPark is set up to handle the level of computing power required by these clients. In fact, we just completed a major power upgrade to this facility to increase computing density, ensure redundant power, and make it hyperscale-ready.

Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem

Our data centers on Courtney Street and LeHigh Valley in Bethlehem are smaller sites, with 25.9K and 27.7K square feet respectively. A few hours outside the major metro zones, many of our customers choose Bethlehem for disaster recovery, so we’ve configured these data centers to handle their high-compute needs.

Philadelphia

At 25.7K square feet, our Philadelphia data center is also a great disaster recovery site, but its strategic location in the Philadelphia Navy Yard also makes it a popular choice for a primary production site.

All five of our Pennsylvania data centers are connected by a dark fiber network ring that can provide sub-2ms connections. We also have dark fiber connectivity down to 401 North Broad in Philadelphia and up to 60 Hudson and 11 8th Ave in New York City. Our fast connections to these well-known data centers allow us to offer faster recovery times to clients using our Pennsylvania data centers for disaster recovery.

Many of our clients take a hybrid approach to cloud computing (public and private), housing workloads in a mix of on-premises data centers, TierPoint cloud services, colocation, and disaster recovery sites. No matter what combination they choose, all of our Pennsylvania customers benefit from our security-first approach. This includes industry-standard security best practices such as checkpoints, gates, fences, 24x7x365 on-site personnel, badge/photo ID access, biometric access screening, secure cages, and full-building video capture.

Come and see one of our Pennsylvania colocation data centers

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of colocation, download our Strategic Guide to the Data Center and Colocation. This resource goes deeper into how colocation works, the advantages of colocation, and how colocation can help optimize a hybrid IT infrastructure.

Learn more about our data centers to understand why we’re one of the best colocation providers in Pennsylvania. To help you decide whether one of our Pennsylvania data centers is right for your needs, we’ve posted our data center spec sheets online:

• Valley Forge
• Allentown – TekPark
• Bethlehem – Courtney Street
• Bethlehem – Lehigh Valley
• Philadelphia

Are you ready to see one of the data centers for yourself? One of our expert advisors would be happy to give you an on-site tour of any of our Pennsylvania data centers.

Schedule a tour to learn more about our Pennsylvania data centers today.

This interview explores the opportunities and challenges of SAP S/4HANA migration. In partnership with NTT DATA Business Solutions, TierPoint offers Managed SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud. Together TierPoint AVP for partner strategy and enablement Alvaro Gonzales and Bill Strasser, SVP for managed services at NTT DATA Business Solutions, an SAP Platinum Partner, explain what is S/4HANA, benefits of S/4HANA, what holds business back, and how to ensure a successful migration from an existing SAP deployment. You can read this interview or watch the video podcast below.

What is SAP S/4HANA?

Alvaro: What is SAP S/4HANA and how is it different from SAP ECC and other SAP solutions?

Bill: S/4HANA is SAP’s new engine, an intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that establishes the company’s vision of the enterprise digital core. S/4 will eventually replace SAP ECC. For years, SAP has directed all its new intelligent technologies into the S/4HANA platform, such as intelligent robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI). SAP brings it together in a cloud-based model with more embedded analytics and a better user experience to create a state-of-the-art ERP solution.

Why choose SAP S/4HANA?

Alvaro: For what reasons do businesses migrate to the SAP S/4HANA platform?

Bill: Our installed base of S/4HANA clients reveals five or six major reasons. The first is that S/4HANA has a new digital core foundation that leaves old baggage behind. The second is a performance improvement from much faster in-memory database computing.

A third reason businesses move to SAP S/4HANA is the new user interface and improved user experience. You’ll hear about Fiori, a set of SAP apps that work on any device anywhere. Fiori gives the user a single pane into S/4HANA, as well as all the solutions that go into it.

SAP’s cloud scenario is the fourth reason. S/4HANA can be hosted on-premises, in a data center, in a private cloud, or in a hyperscale cloud—wherever you want.

Simplification is the final reason. With ECC, disparate solutions plug in—supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM), for example—and sit outside SAP, because they can’t be absorbed into the ERP. With S/4, in contrast, SAP simplifies the underlying database, tables, and structures to create a solution that is much easier to run and manage.

On top of that, S/4 has embedded analytics. With ECC, you potentially have a separate business warehouse solution with a different front end. How do you visualize it all? S/4HANA brings it all together with Fiori and embedded real-time analytics.

Alvaro: S/4HANA sounds like a big step forward. SAP is known for providing excellent information but at the expense of much complication.

Bill: Yes, it’s a big step. There’s a whole industry grown up around analytics for business warehouse and business objects. S/4HANA provides a simplified and thinner analytics view.

What causes delays in migration to S/4HANA?

Alvaro: Many businesses haven’t shifted yet to S/4HANA. What’s holding them back?

Bill: I’ve seen three major drivers of delay. One is that SAP allows companies to stay on ECC until 2027, even 2030, by paying higher maintenance premiums. Another was early confusion about the migration path to S/4 and what are the business cases, so businesses took no action. Now there are defined migration paths and defined business cases, and it is much easier to define your path to S/4HANA.

Alvaro: You mentioned the business case. Sometimes the issue is the hours and the resources it takes to migrate. There are lots of moving parts associated with new infrastructure. If the gear that SAP ECC runs on is not on end of life, a business might wait to sync up the move to S/4HANA with the move to new infrastructure.

Bill: Agreed. As part of the move to S/4, you have to think about the underlying infrastructure. Is it on-premises today? In a private data center? Or colo?

The shift to S/4 is not short term. It requires a long-term plan for where the ERP solution resides. Will it be a cloud services provider, like TierPoint? Hyperscalers want this business, too. S/4 infrastructure is a major business decision with a long view.

What roles do experience and hosting play in a successful S/4HANA migration?

Alvaro: You mentioned well-known paths to conduct the migration to S/4HANA. We at TierPoint know that data center migrations are straightforward because we have done hundreds of them. In comparison, an IT professional might do a data center migration once in their career. Is the migration to S/4HANA like this?

Bill: Yes, migrations are daunting and risky without expertise. For us, S/4 migrations are now lower risk and lower cost with shorter timelines. We have a personalized factory model, with every customer a little bit different. We take everything off the client as much as we can, so they are not bogged down. Migration to S/4HANA is starting to hit the mainstream now, whether from on-premises to a TierPoint data center or another option.

Planning a cloud migration in 2021? Download our new eBook: Journey to the Cloud: Maximize the Benefits and Minimize the Risks

Your first two steps to S/4HANA

Alvaro: To wrap it up, what advice would you give our readers about where to start?

Bill: Step one is to get the facts. Work with a partner like TierPoint or NTT DATA Business Solutions to find out what it takes, what is the path, especially if you don’t have the expertise. There are several steps in the journey, including prerequisites. Together you’ll build out a plan with your partner.

Step two puts business drivers behind the change to build the business case. More IT-centric discussions have less influence and leverage with the business, so engage the business and bring the benefit of S/4HANA into the discussion about the migration path and how you get there. This step tilts the business case and drives your project forward.

Alvaro: Thank you. Working with NTT DATA Business Solutions is enormously valuable for our clients because your experience is not just technical, you also help the business to plan, justify and understand what they should get out of this, and then execute the migration plan.

Learn more about SAP S/4HANA

At TierPoint, we have the skills and infrastructure to help you implement SAP S/4HANA. We teamed up with NTT DATA Business Solutions, an SAP Global Platinum Partner, to provide an even deeper array of managed services for our enterprise customers. Learn more about the TierPoint and NTT DATA Business Solutions Managed SAP S/4HANA solution.

Tip #1 – Align yourself to the business’ goals

There was a time when IT was all about the nuts and bolts of keeping the business running. You could almost forget the IT department existed—at least until a server went down. Nowadays, however, many business leaders are looking to tech as a way to build a competitive advantage. IT professionals can use this to increase their value to the company.

Let’s say one of the business’ goals is to reduce CapEx expenditures. IT has plenty of opportunities to show leadership how that goal can best be met through new technologies and approaches. Of course, it can be scary to suggest something new.  For example, the business may be best served by migrating from an on-premises data center to the cloud. But what will that mean for the existing IT staff whose job it is to maintain their on-prem infrastructure?

I once heard a CEO say that the most valuable IT people in his organization were those who weren’t afraid to innovate themselves out of a job. I’m sure that’s true, but the IT professional needs to still look out for themselves as well. The rest of Kong’s tips can help you add value to your organization without derailing your career.

Tip #2 – Learn to love (or at least appreciate) sales

IT professionals often say they hate sales —and sometimes salespeople—but what they fail to appreciate is that sales is the business of business. Even not-for-profits need to engage in sales and marketing activities to some extent. If you’ve ever been to a fundraiser for a non-profit, you know there’s plenty of selling involved!

“The outcome of having no income is going out of business.”
Kong Yang, Nutanix

IT professionals that can help sales be better at what they do will find they have some of the best allies in the company on their side. In my experience, salespeople can be quite influential with company leadership when it comes time to approve budgets for specific initiatives.

Tip #3 – Develop foundational skills

Here, Kong suggested taking direction from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, who advises business people to think about what’s not going to change. Your internal customers are always going to want things like improved uptime, greater system responsiveness, and better service levels. Find a way to deliver the core services your customers want, and you increase your value to the company.

“When you identify those big ideas that are stable in time…they’re usually the customer needs.”
Jeff Bezos, from a keynote at re:MARS

Tip #4 – Develop your EQ (Emotional Quotient)

We all know it takes brains to be in IT, but IT professionals can make it pretty far in their careers without ever developing their emotional skills. It’s worth doing, though, because a high EQ can separate you from the rest of the pack. You become the go-to person who is not only technically competent but also reliable and a team player.

If that’s not reason enough, people with high EQs tend to handle stress better, and IT is one of the most stressful professions around.

Tip #5 – Develop your soft skills

According to Kong, soft skills are those skills that aren’t measured by the certifications you hold. EQ is certainly a soft skill, but so are things like empathy, perseverance, and love. Yes, love. According to Jack Ma, Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, it’s the soft skills that will allow us to maintain our dominance over the machines.

“A machine does not have a heart, [a] machine does not have soul, and [a] machine does not have a belief. Human being have the souls, have the belief, have the value; we are creative, we are showing that we can control the machines.”
Jack Ma, Bloomberg Global Business Forum, September 20, 2017

Tip #6 – Practice

When it comes to developing soft skills, Kong suggested adding the acronym TLC to the IT dictionary. However, in this case, it doesn’t stand for “Tender Loving Care.” Instead it stands for Try, Learn, Communicate. The essence of Kong’s message was that many IT people aren’t going to pick up soft skills easily. They need to try them out, learn from the experience, and communicate with others about the importance of applying soft skills in IT.

We wouldn’t think twice about spending months, if not years, developing certain IT skills. Even then, in many IT disciplines, the learning never really stops. We should take the same approach to soft skills.

Tip #7 – Explore new paths

IT professionals need to be careful about identifying themselves too much with specific technologies. For example, there are still roles that require expertise in COBOL, but they are fewer and fewer. If your expertise is tied to a technology that won’t outlast your career, you probably need to broaden your focus. And let’s face it, with as fast as advancements are being made, unless you’re approaching retirement, most technologies fall into that category.

These paths need not be in IT, either. For instance, many IT professionals have discovered gratifying careers in sales and product marketing, and these two disciplines can benefit greatly from their technical expertise.

Tip #8 – Develop your network

While this was the final tip Kong shared, it really can be the most helpful thing an IT professional can do to further their career. A trusted network of people who understand what you’re trying to achieve – but aren’t people you report to or who report to you – can be a real asset. They can let you know which soft skills you need to work on most. They can be a sounding board for your ideas. They can help you explore new paths, sometimes even opening up doors you didn’t know existed.

Hear more insights from Nutanix

If one possible path for your career involves leadership, read Kong’s post in our BraveIT series on practicing leadership. Want to offload day to day tasks, while focusing your IT team on revenue-generating projects? Contact us to learn more.

At BraveIT 2020, Nutanix shared insights on enabling a remote workforce. Check out the full session below.

Now that the dust is beginning to settle, we might ask what we’ve learned from the pandemic and what should we do to address future potential disasters. Several of the IT leaders who presented at BraveIT 2020, TierPoint’s technology and leadership conference, shared their thoughts on how Covid-19 is changing IT.

Held September 16-17, BraveIT showcased a wide range of technology innovators, experts, and IT executives speaking on topics such as cloud and multicloud infrastructure, disaster recovery planning, cloud security, and the future technology trends.

In a session on Enabling a Remote Workforce, TierPoint’s Matt Brickey and Nutanix senior director of product management, Param Desai talked about the main ways in which sudden, major disruptions impact how CIOs manage technology and work in their organizations.

Brickey and Desai identified three major ways in which IT managers will change their approach to workforce and technology management.

Embracing new tech to support remote employees

Companies that have embraced new technologies often have more options for surviving disruptions and disasters. That was borne out last March 2020, when the organizations that had already rolled out cloud services, mobile devices for employees, VPNs, and collaborative applications were most able to support remote workers.

“Businesses that have been on the forefront of adopting newer technologies were able to deal with this pandemic better,” said Desai, noting that just about every remote workforce technology currently in use already existed prior to the pandemic, including telemedicine, remote video conferencing applications, remote payment services, contact-less shopping and delivery, and cloud-based applications and storage.

Also read: Equip Your Workforce with the Right Remote Working Tools

Small organizations with limited budgets often had the fewest options, but even many large companies lagged behind in new technology adoption, often due to corporate culture or industry practices that favor the status quo. Those organizations may use out-of-date enterprise applications that are well passed their end-of-life services, continuously patch aged legacy systems, or use cloud services for small, point applications only.

Adopt an outcomes-based approach to problem solving

As TierPoint’s Brickey noted, IT departments traditionally provide products not outcomes or results.

“An employee needs a new server; you provision a new server,” said Brickey. “But IT needs to be an enabler of business outcomes not just things.”

That products-based approach was evident during the pandemic when IT leaders issued thousands of purchase orders for laptops, home desktops, headsets, VPN licenses, WIFI and ethernet routers, and other remote work equipment.

However, Desai explained that they could have considered alternatives such as TierPoint’s Virtual Desktop Services and Nutanix’ XiFrame desktop-as-a-service, both of which can securely enable distributed workers to access critical applications from any location, over any device or browser.

Also read: 5 Reasons Businesses Choose Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

“Instead of looking for point solutions, they should look for wider solutions to a more general problem,” said Desai.

Disaster recovery (DR) is another area that calls for a broader perspective. For instance, IT departments are used to handling server outages. But what if the entire server farm suddenly goes dark? Or a flood or fire takes out the corporate data center? You can’t simply replace hundreds of servers.

“IT needs to proactively look for larger global sets of problems and solutions, not just small, short-term ones,” said Desai. “For instance, we’ve had a lot of fires in California that forced people and businesses to relocate. If your data center were impacted by a massive fire, could you switch access to your data to another data center?”

Greater collaboration with IT services providers

Outsourcing parts of your IT operations is common in companies of all sizes. CIOs will often outsource activities that are either outside of the experience of in-house IT staff or take up too much of the IT staff’s time. Examples include cloud storage and compute resources, software as a service, security monitoring, and managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Desai predicts that outside service providers will continue to be a key resource for IT organizations. Outsourcers such as managed services providers offer a cost-effective alternative to building out data centers or hiring additional IT staff.

Service providers can also give organizations access to new technologies that they wouldn’t have the time to research or implement on their own.

“IT will need to rely on outside experts like TierPoint more than they used to,” said Desai. “A good IT provider can enable a remote workforce for any organization. Think of them as part of your team.”

Watch the full BraveIT 2020 Nutanix session

Learn more about the BraveIT Conference and watch more sessions

Want to hear more advice and insight on surviving and thriving in the face of rapid change and potential disruptions? Watch all of the presentations by IT industry leaders at BraveIT 2020.

Learn more about TierPoint’s new Virtual Desktop Services powered by Nutanix Frame.

What is VDI?

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI is the hosting of desktop environments on central servers. It is a form of desktop virtualization—the desktop operating system (OS) images run within virtual machines (VMs) and are delivered to clients over a network. Those client endpoints can be PCs, tablets, thin client terminals, and even zero client devices with neither storage nor operating system. The endpoint devices do not need to be preinstalled with the OS or applications—only a browser.

Why VDI is good for employees

VDI puts the power of your enterprise IT infrastructure at the fingertips of your remote employees without the hassle of company-owned machines. Workers get location flexibility and mobility benefits with secure access to powerful hardware and software applications. Not only can they work at home securely on a personal laptop or other type of device, but they can also get work done anywhere securely on a borrowed device.

Why VDI is good for businesses and IT departments

The business as a whole and IT operations specifically reap big benefits from VDI, including potential cost reductions and improved security controls. Plus, VDI expands workforce mobility and the company’s pool of potential employees.

Concerns about the cost, complexity, and performance of VDI have held many companies back in the past but that has changed with advances in technology around the Desktop as a Service (DaaS) model. Previously, a large capital investment and do-it-yourself (DIY) overhead discouraged the use of virtual desktops. Now, improved technology lowers the cost per resource, and managed service providers like TierPoint offer a more economical OpEx-based (operational expense) delivery model while lifting operational responsibility from your IT organization.

Similarly, VDI performance was hindered in the early days but that is no longer the case. Ten years ago, VDI desktops could not match a normal desktop experience.  Now, network speeds and physical and virtual resource performance are much higher, so the best VDI solutions deliver performance that rivals locally installed applications.

How hosted private cloud & VDI add more value

VDI is a cloud-based solution to desktop infrastructure. A private cloud hosted by a data center provider offers many benefits for virtual desktop infrastructure: predictable spend, security controls, performance, flexibility, and less overhead.

Predictable spend

No variance monthly for usage or transport and the use of existing licenses makes for a predictable spend. As a bonus, there is no additional bandwidth charge when VDI is accessed point to point.

Security controls

Private cloud infrastructure is under your control and part of your network. IT is secured with the level of encryption you want and by your firewall. Workers can use networks under your control, such as a point-to-point network when on site and the corporate VPN when remote.

Performance

Single-tenant cloud infrastructure eliminates performance degradation due to noisy neighbors while enabling you to shift and upgrade resources as needed without increasing recurring per-user costs.

Flexibility

Private cloud architecture is yours to modify as needed for security, compliance, performance, and any other reason.

Less overhead

When a third-party data center provider hosts your private cloud, your IT team can spend less time managing the infrastructure while benefiting from a secure, resilient facility. Your organization controls the management of data, applications, databases, and operating systems. That said, most private cloud providers also offer an array of managed services that relieve your team of day-to-day tasks as well as providing services such as disaster recovery.

Virtual desktop services powered by Nutanix Frame

As a cloud and managed services provider, we deliver one-stop support from design to configuration and from deployment to monitoring and lifecycle maintenance of your enterprise virtual desktop solution. Plus, your managed VDI solution can be combined with security, disaster recovery and productivity features such as managed multi-factor authentication (Managed MFA), Managed Office 365, and more.

Learn more about the value of a TierPoint private cloud for VDI and how our Virtual Desktop Services powered by Nutanix Frame can get your remote workers the tools they need.

Why VDI? Companies choose VDI for these reasons:

1. VDI keeps your workforce working, no matter the disruption

Cloud-based desktops promote business resilience during disruptions. Hurricanes, power outages, and pandemic WFH (work from home). Primary PC out of service? Can’t get to the office? Is your office not fit for habitation? Working from home for the foreseeable future? Not a problem. VDI is ideal for employees who need an alternative mode of access to their corporate desktop and familiar apps. An enterprise virtual desktop solution can serve users in any location and on any device that has a browser.

VDI is a popular remote desktop solution for a variety of scenarios: employees and contractors working from home, while traveling, hot desking, and in co-working spaces. A fast, full desktop experience and secure access to critical information and applications from a company-owned or bring-your-own device (BYOD) is available anywhere with internet connectivity.

2. VDI can improve your employee retention and acquisition initiatives

Your ability to support a remote or mobile workforce with virtual desktops enables your company to retain valued employees when they relocate or require a work-from-home solution. Plus, VDI might make your current employees happier, too. Technology-related factors make up 30% of what drives an engaged employee, according to Forrester.

In the same way, VDI can enable your company to acquire talent from farther afield—in other cities, rural workers, even globally.

3. VDI is device-agnostic and delivers desktops to a range of devices

Physical devices are a never-ending burden for IT. Forrester reports that 67% of organizations expect to replace corporate-owned laptops at least every three years. In contrast, VDI is device agnostic. Users connect to a secure VDI environment with authentication from any device with an HTML5-compatible browser and internet connectivity. VDI can extract valuable years of service from laptops, tablets and thin clients.

With VDI, the hardware on the user’s device does not drive performance. Higher performance in a managed VDI environment is driven by cloud-based hardware. Specifically, optional GPU hardware in a hosted private cloud delivers the higher performance needed for graphically advanced and compute-intensive workloads.

4. VDI creates another layer of IT security

Cloud desktops offer more security than running an OS or workspace locally, especially outside of your organization’s enterprise perimeter. Three advantages of VDI that can improve security are:

1. VDI access is controlled with modern authentication and authorization technologies.
2. Data from the virtual desktop lives on centralized infrastructure hosted in a secure data center, not on the user’s device.
3. A virtual desktop environment is fully and centrally controlled from a data center where administrators can apply software patches and updates, change configurations, and enforce security policies.

Also read: A Strategy to Overcome Cloud Computing Security Risks

5. VDI enables digital transformation and cloud adoption

Digital transformation enables organizations to innovate changes across business processes and technologies to meet evolving market demands. A private cloud is, for many organizations, an integral part of their transformation to a hybrid or multicloud environment.

VDI is one of the many valuable uses of a private cloud. VDI can deliver a Windows workspace service sized based on your current and future requirements. Use cases range from office productivity to graphics-intensive applications.

A virtual desktop service is a win-win solution for users and IT transformation. A managed VDI service promotes business innovation and allows IT teams to shift away from management and upkeep of physical equipment, decreasing IT management overhead. VDI is scalable, so it can adapt as your business needs change or your user base grows to reach employees worldwide.

A managed VDI solution can help you now

While VDI does solve a number of common and immediate challenges, it is not without complexity when it comes to implementation and ongoing maintenance. For enterprises that are new to the concept or just not interested in the ongoing burden of infrastructure upkeep and VDI control plane maintenance the right solution for your IT team may be a VDI service delivered by a qualified Managed Services Provider, also known as DaaS or Desktop as a Service. A DaaS solution provides configuration, deployment, and ongoing administration and support for your managed dedicated VDI solution deployed in a secure, hosted private cloud infrastructure — all managed for you.

As a leading cloud and managed services provider, TierPoint delivers one-stop support from design to configuration and from deployment to monitoring and lifecycle maintenance of your enterprise virtual desktop solution. Plus, your managed VDI solution can be combined with security and productivity features such as managed multi-factor authentication (Managed MFA), Managed Office 365, and more.

At TierPoint, we are your virtual desktop experts. We take responsibility for design, configuration, deployment, and ongoing maintenance and support for all components. Our service includes proactive monitoring and performance optimization to ensure the utmost availability and best desktop as a service experience for your users. Learn about a TierPoint Hosted Private Cloud with Managed VDI implemented with Nutanix Frame.

COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the work-from-home movement as employers explore ways to keep employees healthy by keeping them apart. The need to keep the business functioning even when staff can’t be at the office has overridden any lingering sense of mistrust. Many have opted for part-time remote work arrangements to give staff more room to spread out. PWC researchers found that the percentage of employers that allow most of their employees to work remotely at least part-time jumped from 39% pre-COVID to 77% since the pandemic began.

Perhaps most interesting is PWC’s finding that 55% of employers expect to continue to allow employees to work remotely after the pandemic is under control — a figure that is very similar to Global Workplace Analytics’ estimate of the percentage of jobs that could be performed remotely. Moving forward, employers will be looking for ways to allow employees to work remotely instead of reasons to prevent it.

What remote work really means for IT organizations

While employers are recognizing the benefits of a remote (or even semi-remote) workforce, remote working arrangements put additional burdens on IT. IT must evolve their operational and architectural strategies to support the business’s new outlook on remote work. IT must be able to support employees’ technical needs as they move from the office to their homes and back. Data and applications must be kept secure without a sacrifice in application performance or availability. IT must develop new strategies for mitigating risks and responding to incidents based on new IT infrastructure architectures.

These objectives are highlighted throughout many of the sessions we have slated for this year’s BraveIT conference later this month. Read on to find out how to address these challenges. Read more about accelerating digital transformation.

Create remote workforce flexibility

Many remote work arrangements are part-time, rotating employees’ days in the office to maintain face-to-face connections, while giving them room to maintain social distance. For the IT organization, this often means implementing a mix of cloud and on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to allow employees to seamlessly transition between the office and their kitchen table, spare bedroom, or whatever corner of the home they choose to set up shop in.

The new NetApp^® Virtual Desktop Service> helps you deploy and manage virtual desktops in the public cloud in just a few hours so that you can scale up and down quickly. NetApp HCI lets you run virtual desktops and other user applications side by side on the same system, giving you flexibility in the data center.

Reduce the risk of cybercrime

Remote workforces are a magnet for cybercrime, as laptops, devices, and home-based networks rarely have the level of security that office-based systems do. According to the FBI, cybercrime has jumped 300% since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The innovative NetApp FPolicy Zero Trust Engine is built into NetApp data management software and uses behavioral analytics to identify and stop malicious activity. NetApp solutions for ransomware help you detect malicious code across public cloud platforms and on-premises environments, prevent that code from spreading, and recover quickly after an attack.

Keep remote IT staff up and running

IT workers need to be kept safe. This requires giving them remote visibility to assess IT performance, optimize applications, and monitor security. Many monitoring tools provide visibility into just one aspect of the infrastructure. NetApp Cloud Insights provides visibility across your entire infrastructure, including private data centers and public cloud providers, so IT engineers can configure systems, monitor performance, and make adjustments remotely to maintain reliability and manage costs. Read more about how you can put the right pieces in place to accelerate digital transformation.

Hear more about the future of IT at BraveIT 2020

The pandemic has forced most organizations to adapt to new ways of doing business. This year at the BraveIT 2020 conference, two sessions will focus on the business impact of COVID-19. The first session will address how businesses pivoted to the changes earlier this year. The second session will address how businesses will pivot for the post-COVID future. See the full conference agenda.

BraveIT 2020 (September 16-17) brings IT professionals, technology thought leaders, and cloud and infrastructure solution providers together for a two-day virtual presentation of workshops, panels, interviews, and peer-to-peer sessions on the future of IT. Register for free tickets to BraveIT 2020.

BraveIT Spotlights are guest blog posts from our 2020 BraveIT sponsors. Kim Stevenson is the SVP & General Manager for FDSBU. NetApp is a global leader in providing data management services and hybrid cloud data services.