Return On Investment

Transcription

1 Return On Investment

2 01 Problem Statement 07 Office Professional Plus 02 Business Challenges 08 Benefits Table of Contents 03 Solution Exchange Online 10 Call to Action About Geocent 05 Lync Online 11 Contact Geocent 06 SharePoint Online

3 Problem Statement IT is facing increased pressure to deliver agile solutions to end users that are mobile, secure, and scalable. More and more are turning to the Cloud to provide these solutions. Some of these reasons include productivity gains, elimination of hardware, and reduced IT support, planning, and implementation labor. Office 365 delivered an ROI of 321% with a payback period of 2 months for the composite midsize organization Forrester Research Office 365 ROI // 1

4 Business Challenges A large percentage of today s workforce spends at least part of their day away from their desk. When they are not sitting at their desks, they need access to the tools and resources that make them productive. Along with users being away from their desks, many people don t work in the same location as the teams that they work with. It is important for all of these users have access to tools that allow them to collaborate regardless of location or device. Providing solutions to these problems requires a complex infrastructure that places a heavy burden on IT, leverages multiple servers, and requires significant care and feeding. The ever-evolving landscape of technology means dealing with the increasing frequency of upgrades and managing attacks from spam, viruses, and malware. Beyond the reactive, IT also has to deal with the challenges that come with integrating these services together for functionality and ease of use. Office 365 ROI // 2

5 Solution Office 365 frees up a lot of our time and money to invest in growing and building our company. Randy Clemons, Managing Director, Redwood Global By combining the Office Platform that drives today s businesses with the capabilities of the cloud, the enterprise is capable of providing reliable collaboration services that allow users to be productive anywhere, anytime, from any devices. Office 365 is made up of four major parts: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Office Professional Plus It is through these tools that users can leverage the Office tools they are familiar with to collaborate in real time through , instant messaging, voice, video, shared documents and more. This collaboration can be accomplished no matter where the user may be located. Office 365 provides a unified experience across platform and device allowing for the most flexible and comprehensive work scenarios available today. All of these services are hosted in Microsoft s global datacenters, freeing up IT to focus on adding value back to the organization. Office 365 ROI // 3

6 Exchange Online Forefront Online Protection for Exchange Enterprise Network Microsoft Exchange has been the de facto enterprise mail, calendar, and contact platform for some time. It traditionally had a release cycle of every 2 years. While the current version, Exchange 2013, has worked to simplify the architecture of a highly available service it remains complex. It requires deep technical knowledge and capital resources to manage this mission critical application internally. Mobile phone External SMTP servers Web browser Edge Transport Routing and AV/AS Layer 4LB CAS Array CAS CAS CAS CAS CAS DAG MBX MBX MBX MBX MBX AD In an Office 365 deployment, Exchange Online provides a highly available, geo-redundant environment. This HA environment provides each user with 50GB of storage space and unlimited space for online archives. It costs us a considerable amount to guarantee 99.9 percent uptime for our Exchange servers. With Exchange Online, we can reduce those costs, and we gain time to perform other tasks. Outlook (remote user) Outlook (local user) Line of business application Phone System (PBX or VOIP) Travis Morrison, New Belgium Brewing Office 365 ROI // 4

7 Lync Online Microsoft Lync provides real time collaboration through presence, instant message, voice, and video communication. To provide all of these functions, especially in a highly available capacity, a very complex server environment is necessary. Central Site This environment, hosted internally would leverage multiple servers in an Edge Server Pool, multiple servers in a front end pool, and a mirrored SQL Server back end environment as well as other servers running additional roles for archiving and monitoring, mediation, reverse proxy, and the Exchange Unified Messaging role. In Office 365, this highly available, geo-redundant environment is all hosted and managed in Microsoft s datacenters across the globe. Edge Server Pool HTTP Reverse Proxy Mirrored Back End Servers PSTN Gateway Front End Pool Office Web Apps Server Exchange UM Server WAN Branch Site 1 Survivable Branch Appliance PSTN Branch Site 2 PSTN Gateway Office 365 ROI // 5

8 SharePoint Online <1,000 users Fault tolerance for simple workloads with small volumes of content Two tiers: Combine front-end and batch processing servers Database servers While we saw that Lync was more complex than Exchange when it came to providing a highly available environment, SharePoint can be even more complex. While a streamlined site topology would combine most major functions into 2 servers with the databases on a backend database server, this architecture will not scale with an organization. As the organization grows, the separation of the front-end and the batch processing servers becomes necessary, and then the separation of the search servers. With Office 365, all of these services are combined into an environment hosted on Microsoft s servers and provide unlimited storage growth possibilities. Scale the number of servers as needed. Front end and batch processing Databases Office 365 ROI // 6

9 Office Professional Plus Microsoft Office makes up the fourth pillar of Office 365. Office Professional Plus distributed through Office 365 is the same Office suite delivered through traditional licensing models but with a twist. A major focus area of Office 365 is to provide solutions for the modern workforce that no longer adheres to the single device model. Often users will have a laptop, desktop, tablet, phone and home computer. Office Pro Plus in Office 365 shifts from a per installation model to a per user model. Each user has the ability to install Office Pro Plus on up to 5 devices. The change to the licensing model also changes distribution. While this can be controlled by administrators, Microsoft has added the ability for uses to download Office Pro Plus from the Office 365 portal. The installation leverages App-V streaming installation technology and once complete, users log in with their Office 365 account to authenticate their installation. If a user leaves the company or their license is revoked, the installed version of Office become read only unless another valid username is leveraged. This approach removes the need for Office license management by IT. The change to the distribution model for Office 365 also changes the way that software updates are done. Updates are released every 30 days, just as with the rest of the Office 365 platform. These updates are streamed to the installed Office clients again leveraging the App-V technology. Users receive notification that an update has been installed and will be available the next time they open the application. Office 365 ROI // 7

10 Benefits Office 365 extends the Office tools that already drive businesses. A locally installed Office suite as well as web based versions. Enterprise mail, calendar, and contact sharing accessible from any modern platform or device. Enterprise-class security and reliability through numerous layers of security all backed by a 99.9% financial backed SLA. Collaborate with one or many users through Lync Meetings with voice, video, document sharing, screen sharing, and more. Collaborate with both internal and external users while providing the security necessary in the enterprise. Everybody can use the same document at the same time. We re able to view and make modifications together, collaboratively, and save them and forward them on at the same time to our clients. Michelle Aitken, Administrative Assistant, D7 Consulting Office 365 ROI // 8

11 Call to Action Try Office 365 through a FastTrack Pilot. The FastTrack methodology allows an organization to try Office 365 but when they decide to move forward the stages build out and no effort is lost. This methodology provides a smooth transition between trying Office 365 and full implementation. Schedule a time for Geocent to discuss your environment and talk about what a full Office 365 deployment would look like in your environment. Engage Geocent to leverage the Planning Service Days that were purchased with your EA to develop a full migration plan for your team to execute or for us to work with you to deploy. Office 365 ROI // 9

12 About Geocent Geocent is a full service information technology consultancy. We provide clients with motivated and trained technology consultants that are experienced in nearly every facet of information technology. Geocent provides technology solutions across a wide variety of functional areas. Our clients include government; primarily defense, homeland security, aerospace and social services; and commercial industries such as oil and gas exploration, marine transportation, and healthcare. Through our experience working with both government and commercial organizations, Geocent has developed the flexibility and expertise to meet a wide range of technological and engineering needs for different clients. Metairie, LA (Corporate HQ) New Orleans, LA Baton Rouge, LA Stennis, MS Charleston, SC Huntsville, AL Tulsa, OK Office 365 ROI // 10

13 Contact Geocent Contact your Geocent sales representative today to discuss your environment and talk about what a full Office 365 deployment would look like in your environment. facebook.com/geocent linkedin.com/company/geocent twitter.com/geocent Visit our website at to view more. sales@geocent.com

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