Author: Howard M. Cohen
It’s often said that the Excel spreadsheet application has such an enormous array of capabilities that few users ever use more than 10% of what’s possible. The same can be said of Azure. There are so many services, so many functionalities, and so many possible configurations that few people can keep up with them all. As a result, many customers fail to take fullest possible advantage of everything that’s available there for them. This is why working closely with an organization that specializes in optimizing Azure is so valuable.
You may work for years in a particular office building when you suddenly discover there’s a wonderful café downstairs. Delightful pastries and delicious brewed coffee. If only you had found this wonderful place years ago…
IYKYK
One of the wonderful shorthand acronyms people love to use while texting, IYKYK stands for “If You Know, You Know!”
The opposite is true as well. If you don’t know, you don’t know.
When talking about an enormous, extensive cloud services platform like Azure, there’s much to know, and it is very likely you don’t know everything that’s available to you there. If the workloads you’re running on Azure are rudimentary, it may not matter that there are services, configurations, utilities, and other features available that you aren’t currently using. You may be able to get the job done without them.
Whose Job Is It?
Ask yourself, in your organization, whose job is it to know all the features, functionalities, capabilities and capacities of the Azure cloud platform? Your answer is likely nobody.
Those who sell IT solutions will tell you that many projects are inspired when an engineer, a consultant, or a salesperson informs a customer about capabilities they didn’t know existed on the Azure platform. In their company, many of the members of the team are expected to keep constant track of what’s available on the platform. Given their experience designing, developing, and deploying many, many projects, they also possess an excellent ability to apply this knowledge to a wide range of situations.
Although your company may have a large IT staff, there’s real value to working with experts on how best to deploy your workloads to Azure, and to protect them, especially those that are critical to your business.
Begin With What You Want
Experienced IT professionals will tell you that the best place to begin any IT project is by identifying, defining, and documenting exactly what you want. What outputs do you want in the form of reports, dashboards, analytics, or notifications. What processes will need to run to achieve these outputs?
The next step, which is not always as obvious, is to share these observations of your desired outcomes with experienced Azure experts who are most familiar with even the latest advances on the platform, and have applied many of the features, functions, capabilities, and capacities for other customers. Remarkably often, this will trigger new and innovative ideation you would not have thought of without knowing that Azure was capable of doing many things you weren’t aware of, but your experts are.
The Experts Behind the Experts
Many, many Microsoft Partners are Azure experts, though not all. You may be working with a Microsoft Partner who specializes in business applications, or server-based computing, database management, office productivity in the modern workplace, or other areas of focus.
The best of these partners follow the sage guidance Microsoft has been training them on for decades and align themselves with expert partners who specialize in areas where they do not.
Idenxt partners with many of these Microsoft Partners to bring Azure acumen, experience, and knowledge to their projects. When you discuss incorporating Azure into your IT plans, suggest to your Partner that they may want to explore bringing Idenxt into the project to provide extraordinary protection for business-critical applications and the most informed, experienced guidance available for the Azure platform.
To learn more, contact us here.