Don't Compromise Your IT! Modernize It!

Customers that I work with, like many of you, are actively seeking ways to reduce costs.  Whether they are managing the IT department for a large organization or a small business, they are experiencing increasing pressure to do more with less.  Are you feeling the "pinch" too?

What does this mean?  It means that you must improve or, at the very least, maintain your service level of your IT services to your internal and external customers with a fixed or smaller IT budget.  Your business must continue to run well, or more importantly, run faster so you can out-perform your competitors and grab a bigger market share of a slowing market.

In other words, to survive, you MUST NOT COMPROMISE your IT services.  The only way out is to MODERNIZE your IT.  So, how can you get started?

Top 4 Ways to "Plug the Holes" and Modernize IT

1.     Consolidate Your Datacenter and Virtualize - Did you know that you can consolidate your datacenter and application servers to save money?  That's right.  It's about reducing the powering and cooling costs of your under-utilized servers, whether they are file-and-print servers, domain controllers, mail servers or even SQL database servers.  Hyper-V hypervisor technology is a great way to virtualize these machines into a smaller footprint.  Additionally, you can save money by leveraging the LiveMigration feature of Hyper-V, as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, to move workloads around when you have to recover from a disaster or when you want to simply optimize your datacenter operations.

2.     Optimize Your Desktops - Are your desktops outdated now?  Have you been allowing your desktops in your branch offices to fly "under the radar" without your centralized management?  What about the worry that confidential data from your laptops could get into the wrong hands?  We got you covered.  Windows 7, the new operating system from Microsoft that will be available in stores worldwide on October 22, will give you a better and more performing OS.  It's got faster search, very cool looking user interface and BitLocker and BitLocker-to-Go features to secure your data on your Windows 7 PCs or USB sticks.  DirectAccess, a technology that gives your mobile users a secured way to access corporate data without a VPN network, can save you a lot of time to manage your desktops.  Time is money right?

3.     Centralize Management of Your Multi-Vendor IT Environment - Over the years, your company may have been growing and deploying technologies from many software vendors.  However, when time is tight, centralized management is becoming more critical.  You may have virtualized servers by different vendors like Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware.  Perhaps, you have a blend of Windows Server servers and Linux ones.  Fortunately, my colleagues from the System Center team have a great family of management solutions to help you centrally manage these heterogenous "mish-mash" of physical and virtual machines.  That's right, it's all done from a "single pane of glass."  Imagine yourself using a single solution to keep track of the health of every part of your IT operations like the true captain of your IT ship.

4.     Reduce Potential Security Risks - Lastly, your assets are critical and highly confidential.  However, you cannot afford to overly restrict the access of these corporate data and assets for the sake of "being safe." After all, your IT users, need the data to do their job.  Microsoft Forefront is the way to go.  This set of identity-based solutions can help you secure remote access while ensuring secured access management that meets your business and IT needs at the least cost possible.

Learn from Your Peers

• Virtualization Solution Helps Brazil's Central Bank Cut Power Costs by 20 Percent
• Certification Company Cut Bandwidth Costs, Halves Sever Hardare Spending

Get Started with the IT Modernization

• Learn more about how Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Forefront and System Center can help you.
• Download free automated tools and best practice, called Microsoft Solution Accelerators, to help you with assessment, planning, securing, deployment and management of your "IT Modernization" projects. Tools like Windows Optimized Desktop Toolkit, Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides, and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit can give you a jumpstartand help youovercome deployment roadblocks.

Stop letting your precious IT dollar leak out of your pocket. Start saving money!  With Less Do More.  It can be done.

Baldwin Ng