How to Get the Most Out of Your Microsoft Cloud

Cloud migration is hot. And rightly so. But your IT team needs to know exactly what’s coming to be in complete control of your actions. There are plenty of other hurdles to take along the way. Don’t let your investment go to waste and get the most out of your cloud. Here are some tips on how to maximize the opportunities offered by a Microsoft Office 365 cloud. Let’s get started.

Can your IT team manage a cloud environment? Great! Our solution advisors, however, noticed that many organization struggle to maximize the opportunities offered by Office 365. Would you like increased employee productivity, improved security and a larger ROI?

Any good manager needs his staff to specialize to improve overall efficiency. Nothing new; just think about fitness trainers, shooting coaches or race engineers. So why would it be different for cloud services?

Dedicated cloud experts can help you avoid jumping into the unknown:

1. Do you have the expertise required to migrate and manage your cloud?
2. Can you save money by using the optimal licensing mix?
3. Do you enable your users to utilize your cloud solution’s productivity and collaboration features?
4. Are you using the right best practices to secure your cloud environment?

Our Microsoft solution advisors have more than enough expertise to help you tackle each of these challenges. And we want to share that knowledge with you.

Before you go a new route, you need to explore it. Plan your migration meticulously and discuss it with a specialist. The right feedback can make a world of difference. Only after a thorough analysis of your organization’s IT (infra)structure, can you make the right decision.

Post-migration stress and nightmares of downtime are perfectly normal, right? No. If you would rather migrate in peace, make sure to have cloud support at hand. At all times.

Find a reliable partner that can help you analyze, prepare and execute your cloud migration with availability assurance of on premise infrastructure. And don’t forget about the support afterwards.

Cloud services are not cheap, but there is a financial upside. Microsoft Office 365 presents you with a clear overview of software usage in your organization.

The complete usage overview helps you determine which licenses you need and, more importantly, which licenses you don’t. Eliminating redundant licenses is one of the main advantages of software asset management in the cloud.

Finally, if you choose the right cloud partner, you can negotiate better deals with your supplier of choice.

The basic requirement for increased productivity is, you’ve guessed it, uptime. You need to make sure your critical processes are up and running – always. To achieve such a level of cloud stability, you require multiple internal Office 365 experts or a reliable, 24/7 cloud hotline.

Once you can really trust your cloud stability, start training your colleagues on the nitty-gritty of Office 365 such as collaboration and productivity tools.

One popular training strategy is video. Video training is a powerful tool, but nothing can beat the impact of interactive, face-to-face training. Make sure you have at least one trained cloud expert at hand, so he or she can personally pass on that knowledge.

We’ve been over this for both the cloud and enterprise mobility management: stop taking risks and take the GDPR, and your business, seriously.

Good cloud governance is crucial to keeping your data safe. Take our recent cloud security guidelines into account and implement role-based access control. Finally, align your cloud configuration to the company security guidelines.

If you’ve successfully jumped each of the 4 hurdles, you should be fine. If you’ve paid attention, however, you’ll have noticed that in order to maximize your Office 365 cloud, you need the assistance of a reliable IT partner. That’s exactly why SoftwareONE developed its Unified Cloud Management solution.

SoftwareONE Unified Cloud Management is available in 4 distinct modules: Onboarding, Support, Optimize and Manage. In short?

• Your own custom package: Choose any combination of the 4 modules and make sure your every need is addressed.
• Real-time dashboards: Keep an eye on usage and workload to increase productivity and decrease cost.
• SPOC and 24/7 support: A single partner for all your Office 365 needs – available whenever you need.
• Microsoft SLA credits: As Microsoft’s preferred partner, SoftwareONE can offer you beneficial negotiation conditions.

We are a trusted Microsoft partner with tons of experience in deploying and managing Office 365. We’ve sold over 12 million seats of Office 365 in 500+ organizations, deployed over 2 million users and migrated more than 5,000,000 mailboxes. Are you next?