Recorded March 3, 2018
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Summary
In today’s On the SPOT News Brief, Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke continue the Cloud Series by diving into the importance of a proper readiness assessment when considering a move to the cloud. Primary categories of discussion included cloud viability for business and legacy applications, up-front and hidden costs, brand and type of cloud (such as brands, private vs multi-tenant, and data segregation options), governance, and migration preparedness.
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Full Transcript
Jay Leask – 00:22 – Good morning. Today is March 3rd, 2018. I am Jay Leask, and this is the SPeed Of Technology.
Craig Jahnke – 00:29 – Hey, this is Craig Jahnke. I’m here with Jay, On the SPOT Podcast where we talk about technology, random things and how you might want to get started moving into technology and some concerns going around.
Jay Leask – 00:44 – Oh, speaking of random things, did you see the article we posted yesterday?
Craig Jahnke – 00:48 – Yes, I think I saw it.
Jay Leask – 00:50 – There is now a pill that you can take … I’m so glad you said random things because I completely forgot I wanted to talk about this. There is now a pill that you can take that goes through your body and it connects to your phone. It shows you like the build up of gasses in your body, and you get all sorts of data around farting. How amazing is this?
Craig Jahnke – 01:13 – That is really amazing, but I’m wondering why your phone is already in your body that it could connect with it?
Jay Leask – 01:18 – No, your phone isn’t in your body. You know how technology works better than that, Craig.
Craig Jahnke – 01:23 – I’m guessing Bluetooth enabled.
Jay Leask – 01:25 – Clearly it uses a microwave connection between the pill and your phone. You have to stand at the right angle to the side.
Craig Jahnke – 01:31 – Oh okay. That is awesome, but I don’t necessarily think I want technology passing through my body if I can help it.
Jay Leask – 01:39 – That’s mostly understandable. I guess not everybody is ready for that, but I just thought it was really cool. I’ve taken enough time with that.
Craig Jahnke – 01:47 – That’s when we become borgs.
Jay Leask – 01:51 – Oh boy. All right. Craig, what are we talking about today?
Craig Jahnke – 01:54 – Today I think we’re talking about cloud readiness and taking some considerations into moving to the cloud. Some organizations I’ve heard around the globe are considering their on-premises hardware and infrastructure and putting their data centers in the cloud. It’s a new thing. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.
Jay Leask – 02:16 – I think I might have heard a little bit about it. Just to kind of summarize, if you didn’t listen to last week’s episode, we introduced a cloud series, considerations for security and compliance in the cloud. We talked about why people might move to the cloud, what kind of concerns there are, talking about the importance of compliance and thinking about that. At the end of it, we talked about the five things you can do to make sure you’re ready. You can do a readiness assessment. You can look at your SLAs. You can do training. You can check on tools, and last but not least, you can look at reporting.
Craig Jahnke – 02:56 – The number one thing on there was cloud readiness. I think we should talk a little bit about that in more detail.
Jay Leask – 03:02 – All right. Craig, I was doing some research for this because I know we work on this everyday. AvePoint has migration, the tool, which a lot of customers have used to move petabytes of data. We also have migration as a service. Whenever we’re scoping out a migration as a service, obviously we do data assessment. We talk to the customer about their needs and their drivers, but I wanted to see what other people were talking about as well.
Craig Jahnke – 03:29 – Yeah, no, it’s a good point that obviously there’s a lot of information out there. I’ve also looked at some articles and other things too. It’s not just my opinion. I try to bring in what other people think and other people do. There’s a lot of things on that. A lot of it comes down to we want to go to the cloud. We want to be in the cloud. We’re just not sure how to get there. A lot of people are concerned about security. They’re worried about how they’re going to migrate there, what kind of processes they should have in place, that kind of stuff. Obviously price and budget always fall into that and do I have the expertise to do it.
Craig Jahnke – 04:10 – One of the things we always do or recommend at that point is we start doing what we call cloud readiness assessment and start looking internally to see if we’re ready to go, if as an organization you’re ready to go and what kind of things they should do.
Jay Leask – 04:24 – I think when I’m talking to a customer the questions I’m asking are what kind of data do you have? How is that data organized? How is it structured? What kind of regulations are you worried about? Do you have sensitive data that you maybe don’t want to go to the cloud or when it does go to the cloud, you want to make sure it’s protected properly so only people that should see that sensitive data within my organization can?
Craig Jahnke – 04:50 – It’s important to find those drivers. What’s driving your need to the cloud? What do you want to move? As you said, how secure are we looking to be? Is this highly sensitive information, which we probably wouldn’t recommend or doing that less as a starting point or doing something that’s a little bit less risky to the organization, right?
Jay Leask – 05:13 – Yeah. When talking about the drivers, is this an IT driven exercise because they were told to save money? Is this a leadership driven exercise because there’s a specific type of tool they want to do or maybe there’s some kickbacks that they know that they’re going to get by switching? It’s funny. One of the conversations I hear the account reps talk about all the time is switching customers from perpetual to subscription model. One of the things that most of our customers are getting when they make that switch is while they’re spending a little bit more money every year, they’re getting way more software in doing so.
Jay Leask – 05:54 – If you’re a Microsoft customer, if you have an enterprise license and you’re going from the on-premises model to the cloud model, to SaaS or whatever, maybe leadership is seeing … Not kickbacks, I don’t mean personal kickbacks, but maybe leadership is seeing discounts from Microsoft to make that switch. Now IT has to make that happen and users are just squished in the middle of going, “Wait. What is happening to my interface?”
Craig Jahnke – 06:21 – That’s a good point and an interesting one that I had is a lot of conversation I had yesterday, we were talking about it. Sometimes I want to know do you have budget allocated to this? You’re talking about drivers. Because sometimes I have the people that are kicking the wheels saying, “Hey, we want to go to this. What’s it going to cost?” In the end you have other people are saying that we have to go, “Does your cost model fit our cost model?” A lot of that again comes from upper management and what’s the drive to the cloud. Are we doing it to take advantage of what’s out there?
Craig Jahnke – 06:52 – One of the other things you pointed out was they get the software and being in the cloud using that software is constantly being updated. You’re getting the latest greatest versions. Whereas staying on-premises, you get a version of 2010, 2013, 2016. The providers of software are trying to ramp that up to master cloud, but there’s no way to keep pace with that.
Jay Leask – 07:13 – Let’s talk about that for a minute. When you have a controlled on-premises solution, you know what software is there. You know when it’s going to get updated. You know what new features are going to come out with that update. You have months, if not years to plan for that. When you’re in the cloud using software as a service especially, you have no idea. Well, I mean you have an idea. It’s just a different ball game.
Craig Jahnke – 07:37 – I would argue against what you just said.
Jay Leask – 07:40 – Go ahead.
Craig Jahnke – 07:42 – I thought one of the hardest part of being on-premises especially my background at SharePoint was you never knew when you were going to get an update. You knew that like three years you would get a full version, but sometimes there were features that you would want. Even with Windows for that matter, they release bug patches and fixes to things that they found along the way. You never knew really when those were coming out, although sometimes there’s a monthly release or something. You never knew what the impact to your environment was going to be, right?
Craig Jahnke – 08:11 – I know several people that would wait two to three patches to apply to their infrastructure and let somebody else implement those first to make sure that it didn’t break the system or what it would break would already be caught and there would be some remedies around that. What gets interesting with that, I’m sorry this is a tangent, they go … Security gets suffered, right? You’re looking at hey, there comes a vulnerability in something that you’re doing. Hackers find out about it. They immediately try to take advantage of that, but you’re waiting two to three releases to patch it because you’re worried that applying that patch is going to break something to your system.
Craig Jahnke – 08:58 – There remains a vulnerability point, right, where your software is kind of out of date and it makes it exploitable. That’s where some of the biggest exploitations and hacking ha come from is that people just couldn’t patch their systems fast enough, which the cloud takes a lot of that out of.
Jay Leask – 09:19 – That’s an interesting point, and I didn’t mean that you knew perfectly, but you also had control over when that got put into your environment. That’s what I meant was nothing goes into your environment without you knowing about it.
Craig Jahnke – 09:33 – Oh, I’m sorry.
Jay Leask – 09:34 – No, it’s okay because it is a really valid point, and there are definitely people who are going to disagree with my statement because I was more generic than I should have been.
Craig Jahnke – 09:45 – Well, you know how security gets me riled up.
Jay Leask – 09:50 – With the cloud even, you get that push immediately when it’s fixed and that security patch gets patched faster, but you don’t have any control over when features or functions come out. You might be able to turn things off at like in, let’s talk Office 365, at the tenant level. You can say, “I don’t want this capability.” Otherwise, if you’re not paying attention, if you’re not reading the upcoming release notes, if you’re not on top of it when that comes in to your tenant, you have no control over what features are released to your customers. A perfect case of that is Delve.
Jay Leask – 10:24 – All of a sudden leadership compensation plans were publicly accessible because this Joe Schmoe who happens to be working with leadership on this one project, Delve was like, “Oh, you’re working together on this stuff. Well, have you seen what this is?” All of a sudden that’s public because people aren’t putting stuff in the right place. They’re not making sure it has the right security. You have no real control over that without careful planning and stuff.
Craig Jahnke – 10:54 – Yeah, no. I agree. If they decide to discontinue a feature, you’re like, “But.”
Jay Leask – 11:00 – I really want it.
Craig Jahnke – 11:01 – We digress. How does that relate to a cloud readiness assessment?
Jay Leask – 11:05 – Oh wow. That did go off quite on a tangent. Cloud readiness. You’re looking at your data, and you’re considering what tools am I getting when I move there, and how do they fit together.
Craig Jahnke – 11:18 – I also like to look at what kind of users are going to be using your system, right? Are they office workers? Field workers? Internal IT guys? Because that makes a big difference if you’re just moving your IT backbone so to speak to the cloud, then it’s not really going to affect users or if we’re doing something like a SharePoint implementation where I want people to collaborate, and now we got talk to like teams or groups or something like that that they’re going to have to learn and use, right?
Jay Leask – 11:43 – I was having that conversation yesterday with a potential teaming partner for the army. They were talking about there’s 1.5 million people in big army. Half of those have no access to business applications. They are the janitorial, kitchen. They are the people who work on the vehicles and the tracks. They don’t care about computers and Office 365. They don’t have a computer that they utilize everyday. It’s great that big army’s looking at these tools, but do these people utilize that? A specific conversation they were talking about was Skype. If we’re talking about Skype for Business being used as a major communication tool, well, how do these people who don’t sit at a desk and don’t have a computer participate in that? It’s absolutely what kind of users is a huge part of readiness. Now most organizations, okay, that may not be a concern, but big retail organizations. They have the people in the offices and then they have the people at the stores. No. No. No.
Craig Jahnke – 12:55 – Sorry. Coincidentally I was talking to a customer the other day. It was parts manufacturing, right? You look up the company. They have 500 people, but they really only have 70 ITs. Most people are building stuff or fabricating stuff or delivering stuff. Like again 70 knowledge workers so to speak that would actually be using a computer on an everyday business.
Jay Leask – 13:24 – I’m curious, what did you talk about specifically? Was it about cost? Was it about features?
Craig Jahnke – 13:31 – Well, that one particular was an interesting conversation because they want to go to Office 365 to take … Well, because Microsoft sold it to them so that would be one of the reasons why they want to take advantage of collaboration, but they didn’t know anything really about it. They wanted somebody to come in and walk them hand-in-hand to setting up Office 365, teaching them how to use teams and groups, teaching them what SharePoint is and how they can be more collaborative as an organization. They had no starting point. They were looking for a total mentorship type of engagement.
Jay Leask – 14:11 – I think you and I talked about it during our planning. This is the case of the customer purchased software and didn’t really have the business driver fully thought out. They’ve got more than 80% of their employees who have no real business driver to utilize the software, and they’re sitting there going, “What can we do? Now that we own this, what can we do?” That is part of the readiness. We started off talking about what data do I have to move to the cloud, but what access and what needs do my employees have or what tools are available that can be useful to my employees that I’ve never thought about doing before.
Craig Jahnke – 14:53 – Right. We get all this stuff. I have another one, big company, big satellite cable provider company, who is on Lotus Notes, right? It’s a nice great platform for doing email and collaboration, but it’s being sunset basically. They either got to upgrade to the latest greatest version of that or they need to go to the cloud. We see that a lot too with SharePoint. SharePoint 2007 got sunset. 2010’s not too long. What do you do? Do you go on-premises or you go to the cloud? A lot of these business drivers are being made by just legacy systems getting outdated.
Jay Leask – 15:37 – Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. I was working with a customer at the end of 2017 who was considering moving to the cloud. They were considering on premises, and their real driver was how quickly can I move my content. They’re not from the US. They’re from South America. They don’t have a strong internet connection. They did a migration pilot from their on-premises environment to the cloud, and they realized that frankly it was going to take too long to move their content to the cloud. For this round, they stayed on-premises.
Craig Jahnke – 16:17 – Yeah, that’s certainly understandable. I mean the only way that you’re going to be able to do that, I believe Microsoft has a service where you could send them the disks, but that takes some effort too. Then the other interesting thing when you start talking about the cloud and this comes up because it’s come up in like all the conversations that we were just talking about is do you have the resources to do that. Most companies go through some kind of migration about every three to five years. A lot of people are busy with their day jobs, right? Now you’re asking them to migrate data and do that kind of thing and it’s not overly easy to just pick up your data and move it.
Craig Jahnke – 16:51 – How do you go about planning that and do you have the resources to plan it, do you have the expertise to plan it is really what comes down to it.
Jay Leask – 16:59 – It’s funny. You’re just talking about the planning. Let alone the fact that what tool are we going to use or if we don’t have the resources, what third party are we going to use to migrate this for us.
Craig Jahnke – 17:13 – We haven’t even talked about where you’re going with it either, right, because there’s Amazon Web Services, there’s Azure, there’s Google, there’s IBM SoftLayer, VMware, iCloud.
Jay Leask – 17:22 – You have to take a step back from that. Is a public cloud multi tenant solution where many customers are going to be using the same set of services in the same server racks, is that an appropriate solution? Do I need a private cloud? Do I need a vendor to set up a private cloud for me so that I can utilize that? On my end, I work with a lot of government customers, so we have the Government Community Cloud, the GCC. We have variance of that where there’s GCC High that doesn’t touch the commercial infrastructure at all or the GCC shares some services with the commercial infrastructure.
Jay Leask – 17:58 – There’s even further variance where enclaves like the DoD are popping up their own enclave so that they can have a specific level of security content oversight in who can access. Literally they put the janitors through security clearance exercises to make sure that people who are in the room with the hardware meet certain expectations. There’s a lot you have to consider when you’re going to … When you’re looking at what vendor to utilize.
Craig Jahnke – 18:29 – How do you start there? Well, then you got to start making what are your important parts, what are your important considerations when choosing a vendor, what is their security record, what are their compliance records, where are their data centers because you might need data centers around the world if you’re a global organization and you say you have a location in Germany, but that data can’t leave Germany. Now you need a place that has a data center there. Redundancy for backup because backup and restore or something might be your biggest consideration. Just the number of applications that you want to take advantage of might be a consideration.
Craig Jahnke – 19:11 – Usually, don’t quote me on this, but cost sometimes figures into why customers make decisions.
Jay Leask – 19:18 – On the cost side, there’s a couple of things. I think we talked about this last week a little bit. When you’re talking about cost, the assumption is we’re talking about staffing or hardware or frankly electric bill. What kind of hidden costs are there? When you move to the cloud, what’s your network and bandwidth look like? Going back to that South American customer, they knew their bandwidth wasn’t good enough. There was either going to have to be an infrastructure investment to increase the bandwidth to be able to work out of the cloud or they were going to have to stay on-premises. When you move to the cloud, what is your cloud vendor cost?
Jay Leask – 19:56 – Is it as simple as a subscription model or if we start using their storage or we start using their compute set areas for major mathematical computations, what additional cost would those be? Because those can grow. You may not be able to plan well. If you have a process that’s poorly written, a custom software process that’s poorly written, and all of a sudden it just starts running off and spinning off additional processes and threads, and the next thing you know you’ve gone through your entire budget in less than a month because well, there was that piece of software that wasn’t properly regulated, now how do you deal with it?
Craig Jahnke – 20:38 – I’ll give you a simple one that you don’t even think about. Your developers go, “Oh, great. We’re in Azure. We’re in AWS. I’ll just spin up a test environment, right, so that I can test things.” They need to test something else, so they clone that or they do something and they spin up another test environment. They never think, “Hey, I’m done with this test environment. Maybe I can shut it down while I’m not using it,” right, because how often do you test? A couple hours a day. You start getting a few environments up running 24/7. I’ll tell you, it doesn’t take very long to just inflate your costs like that.
Craig Jahnke – 21:13 – Just simple things, not shutting down resources that are being used that don’t need to be used 24/7. To go a different direction, I’ll give you a hidden cost you don’t necessarily think about. I’m talking to clients who want to migrate from Exchange to Exchange Online and they’re using an older version of Exchange. You just can’t migrate that. You can’t make a hook up and go. You’ve got to maybe depending on the system that you’re trying to do, you’ve got to upgrade to a version that is cloud compatible, so then you can migrate from there. You got to build in those kind of costs and it’s not just Exchange, but there’s other things like you can’t just go …
Craig Jahnke – 21:50 – Like SharePoint. You can’t just go from 2007 to the cloud. You have to go to like 2010. I think we have tools that take your 2007, but definitely 2003 you need to ramp up, right? Those aren’t things that people are thinking about.
Jay Leask – 22:05 – Then once you’re there, what do you need to consider now? I can’t remember. Did we talk about Delve in this recording or was that just in our planning?
Craig Jahnke – 22:13 – No, that was you. You already talked about Delve and exposing data.
Jay Leask – 22:17 – You get tools that make it easier to collaborate, but what does mean for your governance and security? You have to decide what’s important to your organization? What business rules do you want your people to follow? Once they’re following it, then what do you do with that? How do you automate it?
Craig Jahnke – 22:36 – How do you enforce it?
Jay Leask – 22:38 – Well, yeah. How do you enforce it? How do you make sure it’s easy for them to do that? Where on-premises you might have security, bio security, or you might have had less concern because again you chose when tools were added to your environment, now you’re getting tools added for you and you have to make sure you have tools in place to make sure people use them correctly.
Craig Jahnke – 22:59 – When you’re talking about people using the tools, what about people just using the software or whatever in general? I’m sure it’s the same as on-premises. It’s got the same look and feel and works the same, right? Do I got to think about retraining my users and getting them used to using a new platform, using new methods of collaborating?
Jay Leask – 23:19 – Absolutely. One of the things that we talk about with our enterprise customers especially because they’re looking at major changes all at once is what is your training plan? Do you need a training vendor who can help you document what your users can expect and create videos for your users to follow? Because as much as it’s a pain for a user to be told, “You must watch this video or you must read this document,” not providing anything causes a longer term pain that can be a huge issue.
Craig Jahnke – 23:50 – Change management has got to be a high priority when you’re doing wholesale changes to your organization and how you collaborate and how you are doing things. We have a graph and it shows security as being one of the top things, but change management is right up there. Nobody really talks about is one of those soft costs I think that people just bare through it, but planning for that …
Jay Leask – 24:21 – Normally it’s one of those soft costs that people say, “I don’t have the money for it.” I can’t tell you the number of customers who have come to AvePoint saying, “I’d like to migrate to the cloud,” and I literally start the response with, “Okay. It’s great you want to migrate to the cloud. Are your users ready for that software?” “What do you mean are they ready? It’s SharePoint.” “It’s very different version of SharePoint. It has much more functionality. It has a different interface. It has a ribbon or it doesn’t have a ribbon depending on the year.”
Craig Jahnke – 24:50 – It’s great because I had an IT guy told me yesterday. He was like, “I don’t really care if they’re ready for it. We’re going. They will get ready.”
Jay Leask – 24:57 – Oh boy.
Craig Jahnke – 25:00 – This was a great conversation because if you want to talk about privacy and compliance and stuff like that, I said, “What do you want to move?” Everything was the response. I’m like, “Seriously? You want to move everything? You have a lot of rot data, redundant, old, trivial data. You’ve got stuff like that.” The guy’s like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “I want to move everything and I don’t really care. If you can tell why I’m bitter, I went to our compliance team, legal team or whoever and said, ‘Hey, we got all this data. How long do we have to keep it,’ and after some hemming and howling, they just decided that we should keep it forever.'”
Craig Jahnke – 25:37 – He’s like, “We’re going to move it, and then wait until we get sued and they figure out that we have all this crappy data, and then we’ll fix it.” Right?
Jay Leask – 25:47 – That is not a legal team that is versed in modern data issues.
Craig Jahnke – 25:53 – No, but it’s not the only one I’ve heard that, right? Well, let’s just keep it forever. Maybe it wasn’t legal, but somebody made the decision. Let’s keep it forever. The IT’s response is, “Okay.” I was talking to somebody yesterday who works in a managed services organization. He owns the managed services organization. They manage IT and stuff for other companies. He’s like, “Yeah. It’s ridiculous how many companies have to wait to be sued before they start putting in good information management and compliance rules.”
Jay Leask – 26:26 – We haven’t quite hit the critical mass for common understanding of this will happen to you. I’m not sure when we’re going to hit that, but it’s got to come.
Craig Jahnke – 26:38 – I don’t know. I’ve been preaching for a while now that data kept after the time that you’re required to keep it is a serious liability to your company and not an asset.
Jay Leask – 26:48 – Okay. They don’t get the legal liability portion. Let’s talk about the cost of doing the migration. It takes time to set up those plans. It takes time to organize that content. If you’re hiring someone, they’re probably charging you by some variant of gigabyte.
Craig Jahnke – 27:06 – It takes bandwidth to move it.
Jay Leask – 27:09 – Yeah. You’re probably moving terabytes of somebody’s DVD collection because they wanted to “back it up.” I don’t know why they wanted to back it up on the network at work. I mean I have a thought process as to why they did that, but yeah, you’re doing that. If you’ve had file share since the ’90s, you probably have a couple terabytes of audio, of music. Do you really want to be moving that?
Craig Jahnke – 27:35 – I always think about is to is people tend to do stuff where they work, right? How many mortgage applications do you have? How many doctor’s reports do you have? Insurance claim forms do you have? That one, you don’t want to move that because it’s not really your company stuff, but it’s a lot of personal information in there and probably credit card numbers and stuff that leaves you to exposure for a lot of different things, or those really bad memos that somebody wrote back in the ’90s that is now discoverable in a lawsuit type of thing. To your point and I’ll go take an e-discovery turn where we’re talking it’s now discoverable so that can be used against you.
Craig Jahnke – 28:18 – Now it needs to be searched. If you are sued, even though they might not find something that’s terabytes worth of data that somebody’s got to review, it’s a little bit easier now with digital search tools, but back in the day, man, somebody would have to have read through all those files to look for pieces of information. That’s just mounting legal costs.
Jay Leask – 28:40 – Yeah, it’s absolutely insane. Part of me was like, “Oh man. We’re getting into the migration conversation and we’re digging deep into it,” but you know what? When you’re talking about cloud readiness, if you’re not evaluating what content you have and should it be moved and does it need to be reorganized and secured better, if you’re not talking about that, then you’re putting a major liability on your organization that really just … It can kill you. I think half our podcasts we’ve used these four letters, GDPR.
Craig Jahnke – 29:14 – Yes.
Jay Leask – 29:16 – It’s the hot topic. I think March 20th is maybe when it goes into effect. If you aren’t planning for it, you’re going to get hit with it. For a small to medium size company, a GDPR violation can absolutely put you out of business overnight.
Craig Jahnke – 29:36 – Yes. They’re not playing with those fines and regulations around that. You mentioned an interesting thing, Jay. You said we’re getting into migration. I think that is enough in and of itself for an entire podcast. Do we want to start wrapping this one up?
Jay Leask – 29:53 – Sure.
Craig Jahnke – 29:55 – Okay. What are your big three takeaways for what you would plan for for moving to the cloud?
Jay Leask – 30:02 – In moving to the cloud, my …
Craig Jahnke – 30:04 – Just to pause you for a second, this is knowledge by Jay.
Jay Leask – 30:07 – Nice. Knowledge by Jay. I feel like there should be like a record scratch or something. A vinyl record scratch.
Craig Jahnke – 30:13 – This is brought to you by the letter K and the number 7.
Jay Leask – 30:18 – No, it should be the letter J and the number 10. I’ll let you alphabet geeks worry about that one. My big three things. What data do you have that you are talking about moving to the cloud? If you are not analyzing your data, you’re a fool. I’m sorry. There’s too much unknown data in your infrastructure that if you aren’t doing some kind of analysis or locking it down by default when you get to the cloud, then you are putting your company at major risk. Number two, based on the data that you have and the business problem you are trying to solve, what is the right cloud solution for you? Obviously I work in the Microsoft world. I try and get people successful in Office 365. Most of my customers have already decided on Office 365. Joe Q Public, what does your organization need and what is the right vendor for you? Number three …
Craig Jahnke – 31:16 – Yay, number three. Sorry.
Jay Leask – 31:18 – Once you’re there, what are you doing to ensure that you are solving that business need without causing further restriction on your employees, making them have to go to a shadow IT type scenario where the tool that you’ve put in there is so heavily locked down and so difficult to do what they need to do that they just went and got Dropbox. Props to Dropbox. It is easy to use. It is easy to setup. It is easy to get someone who isn’t a Dropbox user to utilize. If they have to go that route, now you’re opening yourself up to a whole new problem because you are so worried about locking down your environment that you made it impossible for them to get their job done.
Jay Leask – 32:02 – What data do you have? What tool set do you need to solve the business problem? How do you secure it without destroying your user’s ability to do their job? Those are my three. What are yours?
Craig Jahnke – 32:15 – Nice. My three? That’s a good question. Well, just security. Again everything should be secure. Not locking it down, but making sure that you have a plan for securing what you’re doing and what you’re moving and governing it. That would be number one. Two, know what I don’t know. What do you have the technical expertise to do as far as the planning for it, the actual migration to it and then the maintaining it and start ramping up where you’re weak and bringing in help when you need it.
Craig Jahnke – 32:55 – Number three, I can’t say this enough, start planning your change management early because you can move to the cloud, you can stay on-premises and go to a new version of a product, you can do a lot of different things, but if you don’t have a plan in place to have your users use it, it doesn’t matter. I mean the ROI comes from putting things into a place where users use it effectively and like to use it, right? If you just move it and it sits there, it’s no good to nobody.
Jay Leask – 33:26 – All right. Next week let’s talk a little bit more about migration and the strategies that you have to consider when doing that. We’ll get into that a little bit more deeply. Maybe talk about process or framework.
Craig Jahnke – 33:40 – Costs and considerations and all that good stuff. There will be plenty of talk to migration. Jay is kind of an expert on that. I like to think that I know a thing or two about it too. Working at AvePoint, you kind of get thrown into the water of migrations.
Jay Leask – 33:54 – You become the chum in that shark infested water. I’m with you on that. Craig, with that.
Craig Jahnke – 33:59 – That’s the news and we are out of here.
Voiceover – 34:08 – This episode brought to you by Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke, two guys who like to talk technology and live in a connected world. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers only and in no way do they represent the opinions of their employers, their customers or their wives. This has been an On The SPOT Podcast production.
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