Rebalance Project Intake for Small Enterprise
Your Challenge
Small IT departments commonly face a project supply-demand imbalance: a limited supply of IT resources to address an ongoing excess of project demands.
This imbalance not only makes it difficult for IT leaders to prioritize high-value work, but it also contributes to poor project completion rates, over-allocated staff, and dissatisfied stakeholders. The enterprise may be forced to hire a project manager and effectively eating up IT’s budget.
Unless the business is willing to adequately resource IT to keep up with demands, it’s up to small IT leaders to find a solution that makes workloads more manageable and enables IT to focus on the most valuable initiatives.
Our advice
Critical Insight
Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.
Impact and Result
Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.
