Nathan Bird explains how its services help customers become proactive, modern workplaces
Elly Yates-Roberts |
Enterprises can use between 500 and 5,000 servers, many of which are dedicated to data storage. Often, companies pay for infrastructure that they don’t use, and these costs can be huge.
Cloud migration enabler Servent is helping its enterprise customers to reduce these costs and streamline their previously disparate operations with automated cloud assessments.
“We carry out a 30-day analysis of a firm’s IT landscape to learn about its servers and IT requirements,” says Nathan Bird, cloud architect at Servent. “We then present the findings to the customer – a process which is often extremely eye-opening – and work with it and its IT team to create a migration plan, supplementing its in-house knowledge where necessary.”
According to Bird, the cloud provides enterprises with greater scalability and flexibility when compared with on-premises infrastructure, at a fraction of the cost.
“There are many migration triggers currently facing customers, such as expiring contracts with data centres,” he explains. “These are very costly to renew, and organisations want to avoid this where possible, so they look to the cloud instead. However, they may have urgent capacity needs or security threats that they cannot combat alone – that’s where we come in.”
Public sector organisations are arguably the most vulnerable to the mounting infrastructure costs and lack of relevant knowledge.
“The majority of these companies use expensive, shared data centres which run on legacy infrastructure,” says Bird. “They force users to buy capacity that they may never use. It’s not economical to use these facilities when they could migrate to the cloud on a pay-as-you-go model.”
Servent helps these enterprises take advantage of the cloud. “The cloud scares many people,” explains Bird. “We use our expertise to settle their nerves, understand what is driving their migration, help them transfer their skills and build the necessary architecture, and ultimately enable the talented staff to focus on other tasks that require human intervention.”
Bird believes that the cloud is just the beginning of a technological journey that could help businesses realise a step change in efficiency and productivity.
“When you start moving workloads and adopting cloud services, you don’t stand still; you constantly try to optimise them,” he explains. “It highlights to people that smart technologies like artificial intelligence are actually closer and easier to use than they previously thought. The cloud gives businesses the confidence that they can realise massive benefits in just days and weeks.”
This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.