Author: Howard M. Cohen
You love it. You can already see how the new application you just invested in will revolutionize your operations and drive up your profitability. Your IT department sees an enormous new challenge that will bring sleepless nights and potentially career-changing issues. Your best strategy be to let them keep doing what they’re doing while you bring in experts to deploy the new software. Here’s why…
When you hear your people saying, “It’s the new software. It stinks! Things just haven’t been the same since they introduced it. Wish we had the old software back,” what do you think went wrong?
You had your team carefully survey all the available competitors and select the one that most closely fit your needs and had the features and benefits you most wanted. Your people should love it because it makes their lives easier. So, it’s likely that’s not what has them upset.
You run all your IT on Azure because it, too, has all the features and capabilities you needed. And it’s legendary for its reliability and performance.
But it’s more likely than not that reliability is the culprit. It’s seldom the case that your team chose the wrong software. It’s more likely that something is causing it to slow down, stop running, or otherwise experience interruptions. When your people can’t work, that’s when they’ll complain the most.
Misconfiguration
If you were asked to identify the cause behind most application interruptions, what would your answer be? Weak firewalls? Weaker passwords? Vulnerable networks?
Guess again!
According to VIACode:
“Misconfiguration is the root cause of most Microsoft Azure PaaS security problems. Azure itself is a secure platform, but it is easy to configure and use Azure infrastructure insecurely. Millions of private records have leaked in the last few years because of cloud misconfiguration, especially the misconfiguration of databases and object storage services.
The average organization operates at least 14 misconfigured IaaS instances, according to McAfee’s Cloud Adoption and Risk Report, with an average of 2,269 misconfiguration incidents per month. Misconfiguration doesn’t always cause cloud security problems, but cloud security problems are almost always caused by misconfiguration.”
According to another report, 65-70% of all security challenges in the cloud arise from misconfiguration.
Getting in Front of the Problem
If yours is like most IT organizations, it’s very likely they’re overwhelmed, especially since the IT personnel shortage continues to grow.
When you decide to introduce a new application, or even upgrade an old one, you’re adding a new mountain on top of the mountain they’re already confronted with. It’s hard to resist the perceived need to cut corners, as in not sending anyone for formal training on how to properly deploy, configure, and manage the new app.
Application deployment is usually a one-time event. Time invested in training will only be used once, if all goes well. You need to ask yourself if it’s worth it. Can you afford to have your precious IT resources absent while in training? Do they have the time to carefully deploy the new software?
Why worry about it?
Why not get in front of the problem??
Don’t “Do New”
Many organizations have adopted the strategy of not having their internal resources perform the deployment of new applications, either tacitly or overtly.
Given that application deployment is a one-time event and perhaps the best opportunity to introduce inadvertent misconfiguration errors, it makes tremendous sense to not have your own team “do new.”
In fact, it makes the most sense to engage a managed service that specializes in provisioning, installing, integrating, and implementing new applications or upgrades on Azure.
Begin With the End in Mind… with Idenxt
The lifecycle of any given software begins with application selection, the investigation, discovery, and establishment of the functional specifications required for the operation being automated.
Next comes the selection of a platform to provide application delivery. More often than not, the best choice there is Azure.
Beyond application deployment, which we’ve already discussed, lies application protection. This accounts for most of the lifecycle as it involves far more than data and network security. It also describes any and every service required to maintain the availability and performance of the application, including the minimization of interruptions or other anomalies.
Idenxt was created by experts who have been providing application protection for decades, using the most sophisticated and widely preferred automation and artificial intelligence tools in the industry. When you select Idenxt to launch your applications on Idenxt you’re avoiding the misconfigurations that plague installations more than any other, and you’re assured that your applications will provide the performance that will delight your users.
And all this without impacting your existing IT staff or distracting them from their current workload!
To learn more, contact us here.