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We’re in the process of moving our infrastructure to Azure. Being the public sector we take things relatively slow, but we’ve already fully embraced Azure ad as

We’re in the process of moving our infrastructure to Azure. Being the public sector we take things relatively slow, but we’ve already fully embraced Azure ad as well as office 365, one drive for business, planner and all those other things. The next step is our servers, they are already virtual and hosted in our own cloud, but moving our database cluster to a commercial cloud is still a big step politically. Anyway, you retrain your employees. You may need fewer in the long run, but finding people who are actually professional at stuff like setting up on-premise security inside Azure hasn’t been easy for us. We’ve had 3 very highly regarded consultant agencies to help us, and they quite honestly didn’t know anything but tech-book Azure. More than once we’ve had to send consultants home because it became obvious they knew less about this stuff than our people. Azure has also opened up for a range of automation through services, but that’s not really automatic either. We’ve had to retrain our people in powershell, and now we’re running a lot of stuff through the orchestra service. So right now, we’ve actually not needed fewer people, just better trained ones. I image you could replace Azure with Aws or any such service and it be the same story.

int_19h 8y ago
If you don't mind me asking - why Azure specifically?
- brianwawok 8y ago
  I would guess they are a Microsoft Shop. Azure seems to have a compelling platform for Microsoft Shops. I don't see the allure for a Linux shop. Sure you can run Linux on Azure, just like you can run Windows on AWS... but I don't think either is optimal.
- theyinwhy 8y ago
  Microsoft throws the moneys at you and "owns" places. They marched into our company as if they owned the place. They have all the selling power and all the money to "convince" you. And yes, contracts are time limited so the big squeeze will be coming eventually.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  We’re the public sector, we operate more than 500 it systems, some of which won’t be leaving the windows platform. We run office 365, Skype for business and handle our Security through af and adfs for 10.000 employees. So we’re already heavily invested in Microsoft as far as what our IT staff is trained in, and they prefer Azure to say AWS often for non-technical reasons, but that sort of motivation is still important from a management point of view, even if you can run windows in AWS. That’s one reason. The other factors is that we’re in the EU and Microsoft were the first to implement our laws, without fighting them. Unlike AWS I can physically visit our Azure servers, though this requires you to throw a lot of money at Microsoft. Last but not least, Microsoft is a trusted partner that we’ve worked with for 25 years, Amazon is not. There weren’t any other options than AWS and Microsoft, because we’re in the eu and in the public sector, and AWS wasn’t under the privacy laws at the time we started. A lot of our neighbors are choosing AWS though, so it’s certainly viable today.

int_19h 8y ago

If you don't mind me asking - why Azure specifically?

brianwawok 8y ago
I would guess they are a Microsoft Shop. Azure seems to have a compelling platform for Microsoft Shops. I don't see the allure for a Linux shop. Sure you can run Linux on Azure, just like you can run Windows on AWS... but I don't think either is optimal.
theyinwhy 8y ago
Microsoft throws the moneys at you and "owns" places. They marched into our company as if they owned the place. They have all the selling power and all the money to "convince" you. And yes, contracts are time limited so the big squeeze will be coming eventually.
eksemplar 8y ago
We’re the public sector, we operate more than 500 it systems, some of which won’t be leaving the windows platform. We run office 365, Skype for business and handle our Security through af and adfs for 10.000 employees. So we’re already heavily invested in Microsoft as far as what our IT staff is trained in, and they prefer Azure to say AWS often for non-technical reasons, but that sort of motivation is still important from a management point of view, even if you can run windows in AWS. That’s one reason. The other factors is that we’re in the EU and Microsoft were the first to implement our laws, without fighting them. Unlike AWS I can physically visit our Azure servers, though this requires you to throw a lot of money at Microsoft. Last but not least, Microsoft is a trusted partner that we’ve worked with for 25 years, Amazon is not. There weren’t any other options than AWS and Microsoft, because we’re in the eu and in the public sector, and AWS wasn’t under the privacy laws at the time we started. A lot of our neighbors are choosing AWS though, so it’s certainly viable today.