Businesses of all sizes have rushed to remote working in a bid to maintain productivity as the pandemic devastated economies, notes Joe Livarchik and Lauren Brunson, blogging for BitTitan.
“Consequently, organisations end up having to manage multi-tenant environments and an excess of public or private cloud resources. This can lead to inefficient operations and ballooning costs,” they write.
Managed services providers (MSPs) and other services providers have had to quickly spin up tenants for customers, from companies to universities, to support remote working in a cloud-based environment. However, streamlining and consolidation will likely be needed if customers are to make further efficiency gains, as a strand in a more comprehensive “cloud enablement” plan.
“Consolidating tenants can improve cost management, security, collaboration and engagement,” the BitTitan bloggers note.
“Where do end-users log in? Where is their data located? If their portals and applications aren’t properly synced with the new platform, the end-user will have to log into different places. Further, users may be confused about finding and accessing their data, where that data lives, how it will be shared, and if it’s still on-prem or moved to the cloud. For IT teams, multi-tenant environments present more endpoints and variables to manage.”
Solving some of these challenges entails constructing a detailed plan for consolidation of multiple endpoints and variables, easing issues for services providers to manage in situations like mergers or buyouts as well. This all should take account of regulations and compliance requirements in the relevant industry sectors as well as the volumes and types of data to be migrated.
“To make sure costs are effectively managed, MSPs and IT service providers should work with organisations to determine the appropriate number of licenses,” Livarchik and Brunson write.
“Not all employees will require platforms and services like Teams and OneDrive; some in-the-field employees may only need email and data backup. Consider the nature of the company’s users and its day-to-day operations to accurately estimate the project costs.”
BitTitan offers its flagship SaaS product MigrationWiz as a solution to the problem of migrating multiple cloud workloads at once.
According to BitTitan, users of MigrationWiz can sign up, configure, and initiate mailbox, document, personal archive, public folder, Office 365 tenants, Microsoft Teams, and Hybrid Exchange management projects from a single, centralised user interface. Multiple engineers can collaborate via project sharing and action logging features to manage five seats — or 50,000.
