THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IN THE CLOUD: DO IT WITH A FRIEND… · 5 THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IN THE CLOUD: DO IT WITH A FRIEND difficult, costly, and lengthy projects to deploy on-premises

THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IN THE CLOUD:DO IT WITH A FRIENDSTRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE ROLE OF IT, TECHNOLOGY, AND SERVICE PARTNERS

ANALYSIS AND GUIDANCE BY

DAN HOLMEOffice 365 MVPCo-Founder, IT Unity

2 THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IN THE CLOUD: DO IT WITH A FRIEND

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The New IT and Service Partners 3

Promises of the cloud 4

Financial: Lower cost and greater elasticity 4

Business Agility: Productivity and competitiveness 4

Optimized IT: Leverage IT resources 4

Mobility: Work anywhere, anytime 5

Security: Information governance & service governance 5

Challenges of the Cloud 6

Service management 6

Change management 6

Adoption, training, and business success 8

Support 8

Integration with legacy systems and workloads 9

Complexity and cost of migration 9

Skills gaps are success blockers 10

Keep your eye on the new ball 11

Service partners: your new best friend in the cloud 12

The new IT: someone on your side 13


technology to your organization.

I believe that the smart strategy is one that brings IT out of the weeds of technologies and closer to the business, while leveraging external expertise and capabilities to manage the chaotic and complex tapestry of services that comprise Office 365 and other cloud offerings.

It’s a radical re-thinking of IT that requires examination of the benefits and challenges of a cloud service like Office 365, the evolution of technology and IT as a whole, and evaluation of the value contributed by a new type of player on the team: what I call the service partner.

THE NEW IT AND SERVICE PARTNERS

It’s critical that organizations understand, redefine and transform the role of IT teams to accommodate the new reality of rapidly-evolving and disruptive cloud technologies such as Office 365. The “do it yourself” (DIY) approach to technology, rooted in the legacy environment of on-premises platforms, is no longer suited to the hybrid services, cloud-powered productivity model of today’s dynamic organization.

As you plan for the role of Office 365 in your enterprise, and as you evaluate options for deployment, migration, administration, support, and management of the service, you must also take a step back to consider the strategic role of the IT division, and how it will maximize the contribution of


PROMISES OF THE CLOUD

The reasons why organizations move to the cloud are as diverse as the organizations themselves. However, those reasons cluster around five primary drivers for cloud adoption.

FINANCIAL: LOWER COST AND GREATER ELASTICITY

IT platforms are expensive to plan, deploy, configure, administer, manage, and upgrade. Physical infrastructure, software licenses, support contracts, consultants, and staff are just a few of the significant investments required to implement a complex technology like SharePoint or Exchange.

The cloud has completely disrupted the financial model of IT spending. Now, an individual can procure a service to address a business need with as little as an email address. I’ve seen customers complete a short-term business project with a 30-day trial of Office 365. Teams and organizations can adopt many services at low- to no-cost. Office 365’s most

expensive Enterprise plan is only $22 USD per month per user, and that includes a license to the Microsoft Office client suite for multiple computers.

Costs of cloud services are also aligned with business usage—they are elastic. As an organization requires more users or heavier loads for a service, its costs rise accordingly. And, because licenses for Office 365 and many other cloud services are subscriptions, costs are accounted for as an operational expense, as opposed to the capital expense of a platform, which must be depreciated over time.

BUSINESS AGILITY: PRODUCTIVITY AND COMPETITIVENESS

Due to the cost and complexity of on-premises IT platforms, organizations often wait months or even years to deploy an updated version of the platform. Because server products take several years to develop before they even hit the market, such organizations end up five or more years behind the curve, putting their agility and competitiveness at risk.

Subscribing to a cloud service like Office 365 ensures that users have immediate access to the newest features and capabilities. The business can leverage new functionality to address business need with the broadest possible toolset.

OPTIMIZED IT: LEVERAGE IT RESOURCES

IT resources are expensive, and too many organizations are allocating those resources to platform-centric tasks, such as updates and patches, backup and restore. When an organization eventually chooses to upgrade, IT resources are spent on planning, deployment, migration, and mitigation of compatibility issues.

DRIVERS OF CLOUD ADOPTION

• FINANCIAL

• BUSINESS AGILITY

• OPTIMIZED IT

• MOBILITY

• SECURITY


difficult, costly, and lengthy projects to deploy on-premises to the extent that Microsoft has done in Office 365.

Customers also find that there is a significant benefit to consolidating and centralizing business-critical information—often distributed across multiple servers, locations, and devices—onto a single service, accessible anywhere, with such strong and pervasive security underpinnings.

When an organization moves workloads to the cloud, and away from on-premises platforms, IT resources and talents are liberated to perform higher-value roles—helping business teams make the most of a cloud service to attain business objectives, rather than just building an on-premises service and keeping the lights on.

MOBILITY: WORK ANYWHERE, ANYTIME

Mobile, remote, and disconnected users, with their diverse devices and operating systems, are difficult to support with on-premises platforms. Mobility is a significant driver for cloud adoption; and cloud adoption enables new, high-value mobility scenarios for an organization.

SECURITY: INFORMATION GOVERNANCE & SERVICE GOVERNANCE

A few years ago, it was considered heresy to suggest the cloud could be more secure than an on-premises environment. Now, customers are beginning to see how true that is.

First, Office 365 is built and administered with exceptional levels of security. From the datacenter itself (do you have tank trenches around your server room?) to the encryption, partitioning and distribution of data and keys, to the administration of the service without access to customer data. Office 365 offers over a thousand security and compliance features that, together, meet almost all major regional, national, and international security standards and policies. You can learn more about Office 365’s security features at the Trustworthy Computing Center, http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/twc/default.aspx.

There are also business-facing security features, such as information rights management, data leakage protection (DLP), sensitive information detection, and e-discovery capabilities that would be prohibitively

WHEN AN ORGANIZATION MOVES TO THE CLOUD, IT RESOURCES ARE LIBERATED TO PERFORM HIGHER-VALUE ROLES.

IN OFFICE 365, THERE ARE SECURITY FEATURES THAT WOULD BE PROHIBITIVELY COSTLY TO DEPLOY ON-PREMISES.


CHALLENGES OF THE CLOUD

Office 365 and other cloud services can contribute enormously to an organization, both in terms of increased value (productivity, agility, and capacity) and decreased risk (information governance, availability, e-discovery). Some of this contribution will be known to an organization before it embarks on an effort to migrate one or more workloads to the cloud. Some will be discovered after migration, when an organization discovers a new capability that the cloud offers.

Similarly, there are challenges with the cloud, some of which will be known during the decision-making process, and some of which will be discovered after making the decision. It should be your goal to minimize the number of surprises in this category. Nobody likes an unforeseen problem.

SERVICE MANAGEMENT

The challenges that most customers identify prior to migration are the technical ones. Because the service has been built to address the needs of multiple

customers, as opposed to a service you build on premises for your own organization, it’s possible that there might be characteristics of the service that don’t align perfectly with your organization’s needs.

A cloud service requires connectivity to the cloud by the end user and by other services that integrate with the cloud service, so connectivity must meet capacity and availability requirements for the workloads that will be placed in the cloud.

A cloud service also will have a defined service level agreement (SLA) for uptime and data recovery that may or may not align with the needs of a workload. In other words, there may be geolocation concerns.

In service management scenarios such as these, where you cannot directly impact the architecture

of the service itself, you must understand the service, its capabilities, and its SLAs, and then you must analyze its cost, benefit and risk to determine whether to move forward with the cloud service.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT

While the rapidly-evolving feature set of a rich service such as Office 365 is one of its primary benefits, it is also one of the greatest challenges that will face your organization. Customers today tend to be taken by surprise by the frequency of updates to the service. Some updates are major new features such as Delve or Sway or the Cloud Search Service Application. Some updates are minor, such as the addition of a notifications pane to the suite bar.

Microsoft has several channels through which new features are communicated. First and foremost, there’s the Office 365 Roadmap (http://roadmap.office.com), on which many new features are announced well in advance, and tracked through first release to general availability. There is also the Office 365 Network on Yammer (http://itpronetwork.yammer.com). And, of course, announcements are made on the Office Blog (http://blogs.office.com) and at events.

YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THE SERVICE, ITS CAPABILITIES AND ITS SLAs. THEN YOU CAN ANALYZE ITS COST, BENEFIT AND RISK.


You can also stay up-to-date with changes to Office 365 through community resources, including IT Unity, which offers regular webshows (http://itunity.com/unity-vision) hosted by Office 365 MVPs which focus on updates that impact the business, IT professionals, and developers. IT Unity also offers several e-mail newsletters (http://itunity.com/newsletters), including the Office 365 Concierge, which is focused specifically on changes to Office 365.

Microsoft is coming to understand customers’ experience and concern with change management, and is evolving its approach to helping customers succeed. Last year, Microsoft introduced First Release to Office 365. A tenant administrator can enable First Release for a tenant in order to get new features as quickly as possible, or can disable First Release to delay the availability of new features by a few weeks or months. In 2015, Microsoft added selective first release, with which a tenant administrator can specify certain users that will see new features early on, while remaining users will not see a feature until it reaches general availability. You can configure First Release from the Settings panel of Office 365 Administration. I expect that we will see further refinements in the control that is given to customers regarding feature

availability in coming months, because these two options are scoped too broadly to align with most customers’ needs, and Mic rosoft is hearing that feedback.

Customers also turn to non-production tenants to evaluate new features. A customer can establish a second Office 365 tenant, in which First Release is enabled, in order to evaluate new features and ensure compatibility with customizations and business processes.

In a worst-case scenario, most new features can be disabled in your production tenant, although the process for doing so varies for each feature, and it is usually a global setting that impacts the availability of the feature for the entire tenant.

The reality is that many customers find it difficult to stay on top of changes when they are focused on actually supporting the business and its technologies. Furthermore, Microsoft doesn’t announce every change. Some changes are held to provide “surprise factor”, and some are considered insignificant by Microsoft, even though customers may disagree.

Customers underestimate the impact that change management will have on the business and the IT organization. It’s a problem that Microsoft continues to address, and that the community is wresting to solve.

CHALLENGES OF THE CLOUD

• SERVICE MANAGEMENT

• CHANGE MANAGEMENT

• ADOPTION

• SUPPORT

• INTEGRATION

• MIGRATION

MANY CUSTOMERS FIND IT DIFFICULT TO STAY ON TOP OF CHANGES WHEN THEY ARE FOCUSED ON SUPPORTING THE BUSINESS.


Even if you do have the most recent versions of on-prem server products, Office 365 will still be offering significant additional features, such as Yammer, Delve, and core security and DLP features.

How will you support usage of these new services when there is no internal understanding of how those services work, what they offer to end users, and how to align their capabilities with business needs?

SUPPORT

Rapidly-changing features and entirely new features impact end users and the ability of the business to maximize its return on investment in Office 365. They also have a second major impact on customers—on the IT organization that must support the business and the changes.

ADOPTION, TRAINING, AND BUSINESS SUCCESS

The rapidly-changing features and experiences of Office 365 have two major impacts on customers. The first is adoption and training. When a new feature becomes available, the IT organization should deliver training and messaging to the business with guidance about how to use the feature (procedures), how to use it most effectively to achieve business objectives (business alignment), and policies related to information governance with the new feature.

Sadly, the current state of change management for customers of Office 365 is often not a pretty one, because most customers have not evolved procedures for monitoring Office 365 roadmaps and announcements, or for leveraging non-production tenants and First Release to get an early preview of a new feature. When a feature is released, it usually appears in the Office 365 UI by default. Curious users inevitably explore the newly-visible option, and fail to understand how it is used. Or, worse, they begin to use the feature without any governance in place.

But it’s not just new features that cause problems with adoption and training. It’s existing features

as well. Many customers begin migrating existing workloads and platforms to Office 365. A customer might move its e-mail service from on-premises Exchange Server to Office 365, for example. Or they might migrate from Lync Server to Office 365’s Skype for Business. Even these changes expose users to new features and experiences that were not available on premises.

Users can now use applications on devices that are integrated with Office 365. And there are new features in Office 365 that did not exist in on-premises client software. For example, Outlook Online (Outlook Web Application) exposes Office 365 Groups and cloud attachments (attachments stored in OneDrive for Business), whereas Outlook 2013 does not.

The greatest impact on adoption, training and, therefore, overall success is that Office 365 is likely to offer significant new platform-centric capabilities that you might not have experienced at all in your on-premises environment. Unless you had the newest versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, and System Center deployed, you will not have experienced major components of the service that is offered by Office 365.

OFFICE 365 IS LIKELY TO OFFER CAPABILITIES YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE EXPERIENCED IN YOUR ON-PREMISES ENVIRONMENT.


associated risk, such as information governance and compliance risk.

During your organization’s migration to the cloud, there will be workloads that remain on-premises. And, in some cases, on-premises workloads and legacy systems will need to be integrated with Office 365 and other cloud services. To be blunt, it is quite possible that this task, alone, will keep your IT organization gainfully occupied for the foreseeable future, especially if you have complex business processes that are supported by legacy systems on-prem.

COMPLEXITY AND COST OF MIGRATION

Even when a workload is well-aligned with the capabilities and benefits of Office 365 or another

As much as you need to consider how you will manage user adoption of new platforms that you do not have on premises, you need to consider how your IT organization can support itself, and end users. As much as you must think about how to drive usage of new features as they appear in Office 365, your IT organization must be ready to deal with support and information governance related to the new features. Support for the service by the service provider can be somewhat more complex and less responsive than what you might be used to in an on-premises environment.

INTEGRATION WITH LEGACY SYSTEMS AND WORKLOADS

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: the cloud is not a silver bullet. It’s highly unlikely that you will be able to map all of your technologies, applications, content and business processes in your on-premises environment directly to Office 365 and other cloud services. You will need to proceed to the cloud in a thoughtful manner, migrating workloads and use cases that are well-aligned to Office 365 and that will benefit from migration, either by increasing the value provided to the use case or by decreasing

cloud service, it is often not a simple, point-and-click process to migrate the workload from on-premises to the cloud. Migration is complex.

The complexity is technical: Office 365 does not offer a “pull my data to the cloud” feature. Third-party tools can be used to ease the technical pain of migration, but they can be costly.

Third party tools don’t tend to help with the more painful issue: the business process of migration. Customers tend to underestimate how difficult it can be to:

• Align migration with the needs of business divisions and teams

• Evaluate workloads for compatibility• Analyze data to determine what stays

on-premises and what gets migrated• Schedule the migration of data and service• Manage and support adoption of the

migrated workload

Quite often, customers turn to third parties to facilitate migration. I’m a big proponent of this approach. The learning curve for a migration is steep,

THE TASK OF INTEGRATING OFFICE 365 WITH LEGACY SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES WILL KEEP YOUR IT ORGANIZATION OCCUPIED.


and mistakes are painful. You will only migrate from Service A version X to Service B or version Y one time, so the investment in learning does not usually provide returns in the future. Partners that specialize in migration have learned their lessons from multiple customers. They have the right tools and know how to use them. Therefore, service migration is an excellent task to assign to an external resource.

SKILLS GAPS ARE SUCCESS BLOCKERS

As you evaluate a move to Office 365, don’t underestimate the complexity of migration, the challenge of supporting and driving adoption of services and capabilities that are new to

your organization, and the burden that change management and integration with existing systems will place on your IT organization.

Consider the skillsets, experience, and expertise of your IT resources. Where resources are strong, they can facilitate migration to and adoption of a similar cloud service. You might have a team that is strong with Exchange Server, for example. They might well be able to lead a successful migration to, and adoption of, Exchange Online.

But where resources are weak, you will be less likely to succeed. If your team is weak in its understanding of your on-premises SharePoint service, they are likely to have challenges with migration, adoption, and support of SharePoint Online. If your team has never worked with Lync Server, it will be unlikely to be able to support and manage Skype for Business.

The former, SharePoint, scenario adds risk to your existing business—risk of failed migration or information governance, for example. The latter, Skype for Business, scenario means that your business does not gain the added value of an Office 365

PARTNERS THAT SPECIALIZE IN MIGRATION HAVE LEARNED THEIR LESSONS FROM MULTIPLE CUSTOMERS.

OFFICE 365 IS A

DIFFERENT WORLD,

WITH GREAT NEW

OPPORTUNITIES TO

LEVERAGE AND NEW

RISKS TO MITIGATE.

THE SKILLSET OF

YOUR IT RESOURCES

WILL DETERMINE YOUR

SUCCESSESS.


feature, which reduces your return on investment.

The Exchange migration scenario illustrates an opportunity cost. If your skilled team is focused on data migration, they are unable to focus on driving adoption of new, high-value capabilities and features of Exchange Online.

Some customers describe a migration from on-prem to Office 365 as jumping from a kiddie pool into the deep end of a swimming pool, or into the ocean. It’s a very different world, with great new opportunities that you should want to leverage to their maximum contribution; and risks that you should want to mitigate. And it boils down to the skillset of your IT resources.

KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE NEW BALL

It’s not only about the skillset of your IT resources, however. It’s also about priorities and how you allocate those IT resources. I’ve spoken at length

about the future of IT, and the need to transform IT from its legacy as a platform-centric “information technology” division that is burdened with maintaining expensive, complex systems and viewed a cost center by the organization.

The new IT, “innovation technology,” serves a strategic role: a center of excellence that guides the business to achieve its objectives with services that may not be maintained on-premises, while optimizing cost and risk.

This transformation of IT requires an organization to focus its IT resources on delivering value to the business, not on deploying, configuring, administering, supporting, monitoring and upgrading platforms. The new IT will be focused on understanding business workloads, and bringing deep expertise of technology to the discussion of how those workloads are supported by technology. The new IT will see changes to the business and changes to technology and will then architect new workloads in light of the latest capabilities of technology, and realign existing workloads to further increase value or decrease risk.

This is the recipe for success in the new world of connected capabilities, driven by the cloud. You should not squander limited IT resources on the technical minutiae of platforms, services, and migration. IT should be less about how the technology works and more about how work gets done with the technology.

The migration to Office 365 is the perfect opportunity from a business transformation perspective to drive the evolution of IT to a service organization—a value center. Rather than up-skilling your IT organization to use migration tools, up-skill them in business analysis, project management, change management, technology portfolio management, and business as a whole.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF IT REQUIRES IT TO FOCUS ON DELIVERING VALUE TO THE BUSINESS, NOT ON DEPLOYING, CONFIGURING AND ADMINISTERING PLATFORMS.


SERVICE PARTNERS: YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND IN THE CLOUD

So who will “keep the lights on” with your service? Who will manage the technical and procedural aspects of migration? Who will provide deep expertise to support the technology? If not your internal IT organization, who?

I’ve spent decades analyzing trends in IT, and one of the most encouraging trends I’ve seen recently is the rise of a new category that I call service partners.

A service partner is, to today’s cloud, what a systems integrator was in the past: an external resource with deep expertise in the service. Their expertise is not just technical, although they clearly should thoroughly understand the details of the service: how it works, where the sharp edges hide, and how to work around those sharp edges. Their expertise is also experiential. They’ve worked with numerous customers, and have amassed lessons-learned and best practices. They’ve

also worked with the service provider itself—Microsoft in the case of Office 365. They know how to work the system when support is necessary, and they have contacts directly into the top levels of the provider.

The service provider is able to invest in mastering the service, tools, and processes because the service provider is able to scale the resultant capabilities across multiple customers. They’re able to hire recruit and retain top expertise, such as multiple Microsoft MVPs. In short, they can afford to learn everything because they’re in the business of learning everything. This stands in sharp contrast to an individual customer, whose IT resources are already overburdened. Learning a new service from scratch will be a steep and costly curve.

If you think about the very reasons organizations are turning to the cloud from a technical perspective—lower cost, lower risk, greater agility—those same reasons should be driving organizations to leverage service partners, who bring economies of scale, knowledge that lowers risk, and skills that deliver the full scope of capabilities of the service to you, the customer.

Put another way, the world of technology and the world of business is becoming more neural. Each service is focused on delivering a scope of capability at a defined level of service, and those services are being connected together to create new capabilities and services. Similarly, teams and organizations will succeed in the long term when they focus on their core business value, and connect with other teams and organizations that provide capabilities and expertise outside of that core value. If you’re not in the business of information technology and service management—if that isn’t what your business does to make money—then you’re likely to be better off getting out of that business, internally, and leveraging the strengths of a service and a service partner to play that role.

A SERVICE PARTNER’S EXPERTISE IS TECHNICAL AND EXPERIENTIAL. A SERVICE PARTNER INVESTS IN MASTERING THE SERVICE, TOOLS, AND PROCESSES.


In the Office 365 arena, Rackspace has defined itself as not just a leader, but a thought leader. I’ve watched Rackspace for several years, as they responded to customers’ needs for hosted services and, more recently, as they’ve evolved to directly support customers to navigate the complexities and challenges of planning, migrating, deploying, and really “winning” with Office 365. With some of the best and brightest engineers and product managers in the industry, including a bevvy of Microsoft MVPs, Rackspace stands out for really defining what an experienced, expert partner—a service partner—can contribute to a successful implementation, and adoption of Office 365.

THE NEW IT: SOMEONE ON YOUR SIDE

The neural structure of cloud-based services and of dynamic teams and organizations is an evolution of technology and of business. It reflects a core concept of evolution itself: specialization. You may think that this sounds like “outsourcing all over again,” but there is a subtle difference.

Outsourcing, in the past, was a heavy lift of on-premises capability to a partner, in order to reduce cost. A customer could—to a significant extent—drive the definition of the contract with the partner. That’s why customers felt they could take whatever they’d been doing internally and hand it over to an outsource partner. Of course, it didn’t always work out so well, and customers went through cycles of outsourcing and insourcing. One of the primary reasons why outsourcing failed, and insourcing began, was customers’ realization that partners weren’t always on the customers’ side. Outsourcing partners had drivers to reduce costs and to upsell customers to services they may not need.

The services of today have a significant difference from the outsource model: they are very well defined. There is no illusion that a customer can tweak a service to do something unique for that one customer. So there is no perception that a customer can simply heavy-lift a cost center out of their organization and outsource responsibility for their own success.

Instead, there is the new IT: innovation technology. As your internal IT organization transforms, its role becomes an internal service organization with

RACKSPACE HAS DEFINED

ITSELF NOT JUST AS

A LEADER, BUT AS A

THOUGHT LEADER IN

THE OFFICE 365 ARENA.

RACKSPACE STANDS OUT

FOR DEFINING WHAT

A SERVICE PARTNER

CAN CONTRIBUTE

TO A SUCCESSFUL

IMPLEMENTATION OF

OFFICE 365.


expertise in technology and in your business. While IT will not deploy, maintain, and monitor all services, it will understand them. It will align the services, their definitions, and their SLAs with the needs of the enterprise as a whole and of individual workloads.

The new IT is the expert that’s on your side, making sure you’re making the best choices, ensuring the services you select are delivering on their promises, and changing services when necessary.

I believe the ideal interface between your business and technology will be

• The business customer. Defines the business need and value, and the acceptable levels of cost and risk.

• The innovation technology division. Understands the broadest scope of available technologies. Informs the business about technological options, costs and risks of each, and facilitates decision making. Manages delivery of the functional service to the business customer. Manages the technology portfolio of services in public and private clouds, development and deployment of private cloud services, extensions to cloud services, and custom applications.

• The service partner. Provides support for deployment, configuration, management, and troubleshooting of a complex cloud service like Office 365. Brings economies of scale and expertise from multiple customers to maximize the success of a service to the business.

• The service. The technology that is providing capabilities with a well-defined technical and business interface, at a specified level of service.

The new world of innovation technology is about specializing, reallocating investments, and optimizing cost and risk in order to maximize value. Some services will remain on-premises, in private clouds,

and some simple services can be delivered straight to the business customer as part of a technology portfolio that is tracked by IT.

But for complex services like Office 365, I’m encouraged by the rise of service partners, which will empower customers to succeed by delivering capabilities faster (agility), with expertise in support and adoption (lower risk), and with economies of scale (lower cost). Together, these contributions mean that customers can avoid IT getting swallowed by the deployment, configuration, migration, and support of Office 365. Enterprises must not allow Office 365 to become just another platform, with the same negative impact on IT, and the same drain on the organization as on-premises platforms.

THE NEW IT IS THE EXPERT ON YOUR SIDE: AN INTERNAL SERVICE ORGANIZATION WITH EXPERTISE IN TECHNOLOGY AND IN YOUR BUSINESS.

SERVICE PARTNERS EMPOWER CUSTOMERS TO SUCCEED BY DELIVERING AGILITY, LOWER RISK, AND LOWER COST.


As you consider the role of Office 365 for your enterprise, don’t do it on your own. Don’t allocate limited IT resources to up-skilling purely in the technology of Office 365 or any other cloud service. Instead, up-skill IT as a whole to become the expert on your side, and look to these new service partners to optimize value, cost and risk. With the interfaces described above, organizations will find significant economic and strategic value in the transformation not just of their technology, but of their IT organization and the business as a whole.

DATE MODIFIED: 2015-11-20

ABOUT RACKSPACE

Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the challenge and expense of managing complex IT infrastructure and application platforms on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise on top of leading technologies developed by OpenStack®, Microsoft®, VMware® and others, through a results-obsessed service known as Fanatical Support®.

Learn more at www.rackspace.com or call us at 1-800-961-2888.

© 2015 Rackspace US, Inc.

This whitepaper is provided “AS IS” and is a general introduction to the service described. You should not rely solely on this whitepaper to decide whether to purchase the service. Features, benefits and/or pricing presented depend on system configuration and are subject to change without notice. Rackspace disclaims any representation, express or implied warranties, including any implied warranty of merchantability, f itness for a particular purpose, and non-in-fringement, or other legal commitment regarding its services except for those expressly stated in a Rackspace ser-vices agreement. This document is a general guide and is not legal advice, or an instruction manual. Your implementa-tion of the measures described may not result in your compliance with law or other standard. This document may include examples of solutions that include non-Rackspace products or services. Except as ex-pressly stated in its services agreements, Rackspace does not support, and disclaims all legal responsibility for, third party products and services. Unless otherwise agreed in a Rackspace service agreement, you must work directly with third parties to obtain their products and services and related support under separate legal terms between you and the third party.

Rackspace cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. Rackspace®, Fanatical Support® and other Rackspace marks are service marks or registered services of Rackspace US, Inc. and are registered in the United States and other countries. Other Rackspace or third party trademarks, service marks, images, products and brands remain the sole property of their respective holders and do not imply endorse-ment or sponsorship.

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THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IN THE CLOUD: DO IT WITH A FRIEND… · 5 THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IN THE CLOUD: DO IT WITH A FRIEND difficult, costly, and lengthy projects to deploy on-premises