Kopis Edge - Issue 5

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M I G R AT I N G Y O U R SQL SERVER TO AZURE

B U I L D I N G A N I OT REFERENCE APP C R E AT I N G A H Y B R I D C LO U D E N V I R O N M E NT

THE MOVE TO MODERN

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4 S T E P S E V E R Y C O M PA N Y S H O U L D TA K E I N 2018


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The Kopis Edge

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From the CEO's Desk A N D R E W K U R TZ

Case Study: Hitachi High Technologies America, Inc. Migrating Your SQL Server to Azure R YA N G E I D E

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The Move To Modern: 4 Steps Every Company Should Take in 2018 KEVI N WEN TZEL

Building an IoT Reference Application in Azure CH R I S SM I TH

Get the Best of Both Worlds with a Hybrid Cloud Environment AD AM D R EWES

Copyright @2018 by Kopis and The Brand Leader. All foreign and U.S. rights reserved. Contents of this publication, including images, may not be reproduced without written consent from the publisher. Published for Kopis by The Brand Leader.


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CEO’s Desk The Right Way to Move to Modern B Y A N D R E W K U RT Z

At Kopis, we spend a lot of time having conversations with clients about the best way to apply modern technology to solve age-old problems, which is why I'm excited that the theme for this issue of The Edge is The Move to Modern.

A N D R E W K U RT Z P R•E S I D E• NT &• C E O andrew.kurtz@kopisusa.com

I want to be clear, though, that when it comes to technology, the move to modern isn’t a one-time event, like moving to a new city. You never arrive at modern—it’s a never-ending cycle of deciding how to apply technology, and the knowledge we’ve gained through technology, in order to improve. When I look at our history and the work we’ve done for the past two decades, it’s all been about moving clients’ systems, products, and processes and reengineering along the way. We’ve been in custom software development long enough to see the move from legacy mainframe to client servers to webbased apps to mobile apps and, now, to cloud-based services, IoT, blockchain, machine learning, and other emerging technologies. We’ve also been in this industry long enough to have some insight about the right way to approach this continuous cycle of improvement—which can feel overwhelming and exhausting if you don’t have the right perspective.

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D E S K

Here are three truths we like to remind clients of when they’re upgrading their technology:

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» It's About Your Customers.

F R O M

Always remember that the move to modern is not about staying up-to-date with the latest and greatest for its own sake. It’s about looking at all the tools at your disposal, the way you do business, how your customers interact with your business, and making decisions

about how tech can positively impact the customer experience. For example, if you’re losing customers because you only offer interaction through walk-ins or phone calls, are there opportunities for your customers through mobile?

» It's About Your People. The move to modern isn’t something where you have to go invent new technology. The technology already exists, you just have to look at what you have, what’s available, and decide whether your systems are still working for you internally. Or, are there better technologies that will help your people work smarter, make better decisions, and focus on the areas where people think best. Anytime you can eliminate repetitive tasks, such as

hand-entered data, make data visualizations occur in real-time, or support productivity by making routine processes automatic, you free your people up to innovate. Make sure you don’t get it backwards. The wrong technology solution will try to solve everything, forgetting the strengths and weaknesses of technology and people. The right technology solution will support your people as they solve problems and make decisions.

» It's About Your Bottom Line. Ask yourself: "Are there better ways, today, to do what we currently do applying technology.?" Business operations are often based on technology that was available when you first put the processes into place. But, now, the speed of transactions and speed of service has evolved, giving you the opportunity to

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increase productivity, decrease inefficiencies, and better support your people—which will always improve profit. Every business has areas where tech properly applied to the right problem at the right time can actually improve what they do, how they do it, what they offer customers and, ultimately, their bottom line.


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While modern will always be a moving target (after all, what’s modern today won’t be modern in five years), your approach to technology can remain steady and predictable.

D E S K

Remember, it’s not about "keeping up" with technology, per se. You don’t have to use an emerging technology just because it’s available. In fact, the most current technology might be bleeding-edge and too risky for your business at the moment. However, you do have to evaluate your options, remain curious and engaged with technology, and always ask the question: "Does this technology present a significant advantage that will positively impact the way that people interact with my business?" In doing so, you ensure that your organization will remain relevant and vital, relying on technology to support your business rather than bending your business to adopt the technology.

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B R E A K T H R O U G H

Hitachi High Technologies •

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Hitachi High Technologies America, Inc. ("HTA") is a privately-owned global affiliate company that operates within the Hitachi Group Companies. HTA sells and services semiconductor manufacturing equipment, analytical instrumentation, scientific instruments, and bio-related products as well as industrial equipment, electronic devices, and electronic and industrial materials. The Systems Products Division (SPD) of HTA focuses on design, development, and manufacturing of IoT systems, in-flight entertainment tablets, and medical computer devices.

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The Challenge HTA’s SPD team in Greenville, SC developed innovative IoT products that allow users to remotely monitor the temperature and humidity in restaurant equipment, such as freezers, coolers, and overnight smokers. The HiQ eSystems® Remote-Monitoring Systems reduce food waste which, by the US Department of Agriculture’s estimate, comprises 30 to 40 percent of the national food supply, and save money in the restaurant and food service industries. More importantly, the products can improve food safety for the consumer, which is a major problem in the food service industry—each year, an average of 48 million consumers get sick as a result of foodborne illness. The HiQ eSystems® products address this problem proactively, giving restaurant owners and other food service providers a way to monitor, visualize, analyze and alert users before temperature breaches become a concern. After completing their engineering prototypes to prove the portal concept, the SPD team decided to test the products through common use cases with a few initial clients in order to improve the user experience. One key area where they knew they needed to focus in the next phase of development was to iterate back through the user dashboard. So many important actions are triggered by the monitoring systems through interactions with the dashboard. The dashboard lets operators know when to reduce traffic into refrigeration systems or take more drastic action to properly cool or heat their food— steps can act to prevent either food waste, or worse, foodborne illness.

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"Our search for a tech partner began with feedback we received from one of these initial customers," said Kyoko Roberts, the SPD Director of Sales. "The dashboard prototype had a very technical look, like an engineering table. We thought we would need something more user friendly, and the testing phase confirmed this for us." Keith Brown, the SPD General Manager and an HTA Senior Director, agreed that the product dashboard needed an update. "Our temperature monitoring system is one of very few IoT full-stack solutions currently in the market that start at the edge and go all the way up to alerting and dashboarding." Brown said.

From an engineering or large corporate overview control and monitoring perspective, our dashboard was fantastic." –KEITH BROWN

"All the information was there, but it can be complicated and give too many options for the many end users. Our customers didn’t want to check under the hood and see everything that was going on. They wanted a simplified, clean visual dashboard that presented the whole picture at a glance."


The Solution Working in partnership with Kyoko Roberts and the rest of the SPD team, Kopis created a mobile-friendly user dashboard that presents a live view, simplifying the data into easily digestible, intuitive, color-coded blocks: green when a unit is in the acceptable range, blue when a unit becomes too cold (below the acceptable range), and red when a unit is too hot (above the acceptable range).

The dashboard that Kopis designed also gives end users the ability to monitor multiple sites remotely from the same device and allows users to click on the icons for individual units to see temperature history from the past 24 hours. Finally, the user interface sends alerts directly to the user’s mobile device when the temperature hits the red zone.

Our team had • with• • connected Kopis at several IoT conferences, and we • • • quickly realized that Kopis was a natural fit • that • to bridge •the gap we had internally. •

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Results Results

C O M P A N Y

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“What we love so much about the dashboard that Kopis designed is the simplicity,” Roberts said. “Our customers can open the dashboard and get a quick visualization of all of the major equipment at all of their locations in real time. It gives them incredible peace of mind.”

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The dashboard was beta-tested with one customer, and, about a month ago, released to all customers. "The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive," said Brown. "We’ve released it with many different customer types, and they all love the look and the feel, the fact that they can pull up the data remotely from their mobile devices, the drill down capabilities, and the alerts. Customers can always go back to the tech dashboard if they want more data and more capabilities, but most customers will never need to and are perfectly happy with the live-view dashboard." According to Roberts, the SPD team is pleased both with the results and with the process for creating the dashboard.

Working with Kopis was a completely smooth process and one that I completely enjoyed." – K Y O K O R O B E RT S

"The whole project was managed professionally, and it felt like a true partnership from beginning to end. The Kopis team was able to collaborate with us, match our work processes and timeline, and complete every step of the project on time." Now that the new live-view dashboard has been released, HTA’s SPD team is seeing it as a major selling point for their products. Russell Kerman, the Corporate Chef for Sysco, even credits the alert feature with preventing a costly kitchen fire. "The feedback we’ve gotten from Sysco is the same feedback we’ve gotten from every customer," said Roberts. "The dashboard is clean, simple, and so easy to use. Every customer has loved the update. As Sysco says: it seems ‘foolish’ not to invest in this technology." Brown agrees that the dashboard has helped HTA’s SPD in their sales efforts. "I was meeting with a customer this week who is a food distributor. We’re now in discussions about using our new dashboard as a demo with marketing associates, which will get us in front of a lot of potential customers," said Brown. "Overall, developing the final piece of this product in partnership with Kopis has been a rewarding experience and a sound investment."

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Micros Migrating Your SQL Server to Azure for Discrete Reporting and Testing B Y R YA N G E I D E

As a SQL Managed Services provider at Kopis, I get to talk to companies about data management on a regular basis and I tend to encounter two primary positions concerning data collection.

Migrating over to Azure for reporting allows companies to scale up when the resources are in use and scale back down when they aren’t.

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First, many of the clients I work with are tracking and capturing tons of data, more than ever before, but they don’t really have the hardware resources or the expertise to be able to dive in and extract anything meaningful from the data. A company may have 5 or 6 years of financial data stored, but wading through that much data requires a cost-prohibitive amount of processing power, and they don’t want to spend 50-60K on a server farm to get through it all. The second group of clients are not inclined to capture their available data in the first place because they know that they don’t have the budget or other resources to do anything with it. While they may want to create more indepth quarterly or end-of-year reports, these companies feel that it doesn’t make any sense to invest a lot of money into hardware that gives them the capability to process data once a quarter and then sits unused the rest of the year.


M I G R A T I N G

soft Azure Y O U R

This is where Azure comes in. Until recently, the ability to capture data has run ahead of the capacity that most companies have to store and process that data—but the cloud is changing all that. Many businesses don’t want to migrate their databases to Azure as a permanent solution just yet, but maintaining your databases well becomes more difficult when you’re sharing those same resources for reporting. Migrating over to Azure for reporting allows companies to scale up when the resources are in use and scale back down when they aren’t, which makes data processing more affordable and lowers the cost of entry for small to mid-sized companies. Extending your capacity through Azure also enables companies to experiment more freely and run tests in a different environment without breaking your SQL Server.

Migrating your data from your local server to the cloud is a simple process, which can become more complex depending on how much customization you require. For example, you could set up an ongoing transfer that moves data on an hourly or daily basis from your On-Prem database server to Azure for reporting, but that may be phase two of the project. The basic steps for setting up your initial Azure database are:

Whether your company has a backlog of unprocessed data or you would like to start collecting and processing more of your available data, migrating your SQL Server to Azure on a temporary basis can give you a practical path forward, extending your capacity as needed and allowing you to run reports in the cloud rather than robbing resources from • • • your SQL environment. • Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a Plant • • • • Manager and you have an ERP database that contains all your production transaction data. Maybe you want to• review•your inventory • • usage, but running queries against the entire year on the production ERP database might impact users in the system. You• have all • • the • raw data available, so you could begin pushing it into Azure. Once in Azure, you can run all kinds of aggregations on • the data • and •put it • into a meaningful shape so you can use it. Plus, once the data is processed, you no longer need the same capacity•as the •processed • data• uses virtually no resources.

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Getting Started in Azure

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How Azure Can Help

1. Create a Database in Azure. The Azure User Interface does a fantastic job helping users create a database. Simply click on Add a New Resource and choose Database, and the UI tutorial will walk you through your options in an easy-to-understand tutorial. 2. Set up Your End Points for Data Migration. Once you’ve created your database, you will need to establish your skeleton, or your end points, to ensure that your data will translate well into Azure. Again, Azure has a user-friendly tool to help you through this process called the Data Migration Assistant. The tool will run a check for you to make sure that your framework makes sense.

3. Transfer all Raw Data. The final step is to transfer all raw data onto your skeleton, where you can run tests and queries to check data • • • • • • • integrity. Azure allows you to use the exact same tool you use to look at your data on your SQL the• SQL Server • • database, • • Management • • Studio (SSMS). If you’re a DBA, checking your data in Azure should feel familiar to you.

That’s all there is to it. Of course, the Kopis SQL Managed Services team is here to help • you with • your• data migration • • and to• look at• the data and mine it for insights once it’s in Azure. We love to help clients start doing more with rather than • their data, • • • letting • it pile• up and• bog down their business.

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The Move to Modern: 4 Steps Every Company Should Take in 2018 BY KEVIN WENTZEL

Many of our clients ask how they can best keep up with technology trends and, more importantly, take advantage of the simplified, feature-rich services that are now more accessible to them.

Move to Modern •

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In my experience, most small to medium-sized organizations can benefit greatly from updating their enterprise solutions in the following four areas:

T O

STEP ONE: Kopis clients are increasingly engaging with their customers on mobile. As the years pass, the age range where people are tightly-coupled to their mobile devices is growing. Consumers are increasingly dependent on mobile capabilities—if they can’t easily conduct business on their phone, they will try another company. An added benefit is companies can use push notifications to communicate directly with customers.

real-time. Making old-fashioned data entry more mobilefriendly means that enterprises can get their data much faster, which not only helps them invoice promptly but also creates a better customer experience. One interesting facet of the move to mobile that benefits both consumer-facing and internal applications is the ever-increasing simplification of the user experience. We’re seeing companies who have complex applications or websites choose one or two core areas that are wellsuited to a remote workforce or remote customer. This simplification, in turn, encourages companies to rethink their value propositions and focus on the twenty-percent of their business that creates 80-percent of the results.

Mobile applications also greatly benefit companies internally, especially those with remote workforces. Mobile capabilities increase efficiency and productivity, even in simple ways such as helping employees organize their workflow each morning or provide progress updates in

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Move to Enterprise Mobile Apps

STEP TWO:

Move to Cloud-Based Infrastructure The cloud is an incredibly hot topic in IT and has been for several years as big companies have become big time players in driving down costs and making cloud-based services more available for everyone. The benefits of moving to the cloud are numerous and include: Reduced Maintenance and Overhead Costs. Buying and maintaining on-premise servers is an expensive endeavor that is eliminated when switching to an environment that maintains everything for you.

A Shift from Capital Expenses to Operating Costs. Cloud services become a monthly expense that companies can budget for rather than a huge, upfront cost.

Agility to Scale Up and Down as Needed. Companies only pay for what they use and can scale up and back down quickly to meet demand. No need to maintain servers that can handle your peak times year-round.

Microservices and Simplified Coding. Cloud services are building in a lot of microservices that make it faster to build and roll out what you need. Can deploy code as a function in the cloud rather than writing everything from scratch.

Essentially, cloud services are making it easier and easier to use their applications and get to market, which frees small to medium-sized businesses up to try new things and fail or succeed faster.

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STEP THREE:

Build New Apps in Modern Languages, Frameworks and Coding Standards Since there’s now a growing user base that’s accustomed to a mobile-type experience that’s simplified and quick, we’re seeing a trend toward even desktop and fully-featured applications moving to the same clean, modern feel. Often, organizations achieve this by taking their legacy applications and reskinning them to look more modern—but just as often they’re completely redoing them and even converting the backend to deliver a simplified experience. In addition, there has been a boom of new development talent that’s hit the market in the past few years, who all lean toward more modern languages. This means that companies that don’t adapt to more

modern tech sooner rather than later are going to have a difficult time finding people willing to work in an early 2000’s language and may not have enough staff to support their applications. Another benefit of converting is that modern languages and frameworks have evolved to become more fully-featured and simplified at the same time. With common task libraries and common coding algorithms, most services are now simple enough that junior developers can create and test something as complex as a machine learning or AI project. This means that any company can reach a level of depth and feature enrichment that wasn’t possible even ten years ago.

STEP FOUR:

Enhance Your Security Technology security is going to be a primary area of focus for the foreseeable future. Data breaches and hacking issues have become highly visible compared to a decade ago, which has made many companies take a harder look at their internal security measures. Consumer data continues to be an overall driving force in business, and it’s become easier to collect and mine for insights into consumer behavior. This is great for businesses, because they can more easily see how and why people are buying their products and respond by creating

a better customer experience. However, with this privilege comes the responsibility to protect customer data. Fortunately, it’s also easier than ever to prevent and detect security breaches—from putting additional protective layers in place, such as multi-factor authentication, to using machine algorithms to detect suspicious behavior. Cloud services, in particular, include a lot of baked in security measures and compliant infrastructures that are simple to deploy.

Of course, there are many ways your company could innovate and evolve—but most of the technology changes that have the biggest impact fit into one of these four categories. By taking these steps, companies ensure that they are making the most of what modern development has to offer.

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Data breaches and hacking issues have become highly visible compared to a decade ago, which has made many companies take a harder look at their internal security measures." — KEV IN W E NTZE L

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IoT Re Building an IoT Reference Application in Azure BY CHRIS SMITH

For about a month now, I've been working on building a reference architecture in AWS and Azure in order to demonstrate to clients and potential clients how we might create a more secure application for processing data collected from their IoT devices. •

With Azure, there is •

an infinite number of ways to slice and dice •

the data depending on who is accessing it. •

At Kopis, we regularly get customer requests (both directly and indirectly through partnerships with clients such as Zipit Wireless) for an application that will process, analyze, and visualize all of the data collected through their hardware. In other words, the IoT devices are out there, serving as portals for data collection, but companies don’t feel they have a workable solution on the other end to make the data usable. There are many available applications that can process data, but there are very few that do so securely while also making it easy for the right people to see the right data at the right time.

—CHRIS SMITH •

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The primary benefits of building a data processing application for IoT devices in the cloud are the enhanced security and user-friendliness. For example, if you run a multinational manufacturing company with fifty locations and collect data from devices on the plant floor, you may want each location manager to be able to access all of the data from that location without seeing the data from all locations. Or, you may want to allow a partner or supplier to see metrics related to inventory from all locations without seeing other, more sensitive metrics.

We’ve been working on the reference application first so that we can stand it up to show that it works and show how it works. So far, we’ve found that the reference application is a good conversation starter with clients, who often know they have a need but can’t quite picture what the solution would look like at first. The reference application gets us further down the field, demonstrates to clients what a solution could look like, and forms a solid foundation that we can then revise and customize to fit their individual needs. Also, since we aren’t starting from scratch with each client, it enables us to get to the first iteration of their custom solution more quickly.

With Azure, there is an infinite number of ways to slice and dice the data depending on who is accessing it. The data access can be based on certain employees, employee groups, or partners from other companies, and security can include users within an organization or without.

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Why Build a Reference Application First?

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The Benefits of Building in the Cloud

I O T

eference In addition to the reference architecture, we’re also building out a sample visual dashboard using weather data from the past ten years— which is a neutral way to show clients how the permissions work and demonstrate the hierarchy so they can see how data flows through the application. Overall, we see the reference application as a scaffold that we can put in front of customers to add value to the conversation and help them discover what they really need.

Azure makes it simple to build on available tools to take in data and analyze it, and then add a permission system to ensure that each user only sees what they’re supposed to see. When setting up security, users can rely on Active Directory, the same identity management system that they’re already accustomed to, in order to login and see who has access to what metrics. Recently, we’ve been seeing a tremendous need for an application like this in the manufacturing space as well as with other potentially sensitive data such as that collected from government organizations and public utilities. For instance, we’ve been in conversations with a company that manages traffic monitoring systems about sending data to the cloud in order to better predict and respond to traffic patterns. Similarly, for public utilities, secure IoT devices that push data to the cloud can send faster notifications to the right people when power lines go down or water lines break.

Find out more about Azure and other cloud-based services by visiting www.kopisusa.com/azure.

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• •

Hybrid Enviro •

Get the Best of • • • Both Worlds with • • a• Hybrid Cloud Environment: HOW TO USE CLOUD SERVICES WITH YOUR ON-PREMISE SOFTWARE INVESTMENTS

BY ADAM DREWES

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Hybrid cloud environments are a recent trend in software development that are creating interesting opportunities for businesses. A hybrid cloud solution is a mixed computing environment that combines on-premise solutions and cloud-based systems with increased integration between the two platforms.


H Y B R I D

id Cloud onment

C L O U D E N V I R O N M E N T

The fact that multinational software companies with considerable resources at their disposal are lowering the barrier to entry to the cloud while continuing to support on-premise solutions makes now the perfect time for many small and medium-sized companies to ease into cloud-based services.

Why Are Software Providers Investing in Hybrid Cloud Solutions Instead of Simply Moving Everything to the Cloud? Most software companies—especially the big players— do want to deploy their software completely in the cloud and use the cloud for ongoing development. For instance, if you spend any time listening to Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, 90-percent of what he talks about are cloud services. That’s the direction that the software development world is heading. However, these same big players also typically have a large install base of mature software products that are on-premise. Dynamics GP is a perfect example in the small-to-medium business (SMB) space. A robust ERP system accounts for a large percentage of the budget for a mid-sized business, which means there are lots of companies that have made significant investments into the Microsoft ecosystems. For this reason, it makes sense for larger software companies to invest in hybrid solutions and build a strategy that supports and benefits on-premise systems as well, or they risk alienating their onpremise user base.

What Does That Mean for My Organization? In general, companies like Microsoft are creating hybrid cloud solutions that deploy functionality and specialized services (microservices) in the cloud while allowing organizations to retain their familiar systems and workflow processes. The beauty of microservices is that they’ve decoupled them from the workflow. As you outgrow a particular form, you can write a custom form for just one piece, ad hoc, and your workflow process doesn’t have to change that much. Many times, a piece of gateway software sits on-premise and connects to the cloud, passing the necessary data from the on-premise system to the cloud and vice-versa. This invisible gateway software seamlessly manages data in both directions, pushes data into Power BI or other visualization tools, and automatically triggers workflow processes. This automatic connection to the cloud means that your organization won’t have to reinvest to transfer processes and data currently housed in existing systems into a cloud equivalent. Without the connection supported by the on-premise software provider, your company would have to find a cloud-based ERP solution and do a conversion, which puts you at risk of losing data and requires a large investment of both time and money to do well.

A robust ERP system accounts for a larger percentage of the budget for a mid-sized business, which means there are lots of companies that have made significant investments into the Microsoft ecosystems.

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The Benefits of Moving to a Hybrid Cloud Environment

» Streamlined Workflows

» Decreased Latency

» Advanced Functionality

» Increased Security

Since the big players are putting so many resources into their cloud systems, they iterate on them and add features quickly. When cloud-services were first rolled out, they were limited and targeted specific processes such as a certain task or a form. Now, they are investing in cloud-based systems such as LogicApps, PowerApps, and Power BI that still target specific needs but do so in a more mature, integrated way. This is good news for business. There are incredible business enablement tools available from forms and basic workflow engines to advanced machine learning and big data tools. This creates an unheard of opportunity for smallto-medium-sized companies to get the best of both worlds and tap into this functionality without having to leave their on-premise systems.

Contact Kopis for a consultation or go to www.kopisusa.com/azure.

While many organizations worry about giving up control or dealing with latency issues if they move some of their functionality to the cloud, we’re finding the opposite is true. It’s very expensive to manage your own infrastructure, and in reality it’s just as error-prone if not more so than cloudmanaged services. As software companies invest more in their cloud-services and create bigger and better data centers, latency continues to drop and is now often better than on-premise infrastructure, especially for companies with a distributed sales force. For example, a company that initially hosted its own CRM at its main office in Atlanta is going to experience high latency when a Seattle rep connects to the platform. If that same company invests in a cloud-based CRM or moves that function to the cloud in a hybrid environment, the Seattle rep will connect through a nearby data center that’s robust and well-maintained.

E N V I R O N M E N T

When beginning to build a strategy for the hybrid cloud, software companies took a step back to look at on-premise deployment. They found that platforms that originally solved specific problems in their own domains had grown and overlapped as they matured and now need tighter integration. For example, a company may have deployed Dynamics GP as their ERP solution, but then added a CRM to the system and a document management solution like Sharepoint. As each system evolved, the company built processes and workflow engines to solve similar problems across each platform. If you look at it, you see that many of the workflows crossover. The sales process ends with putting an order into the ERP system. Document management includes invoicing, and so on. Many of the cloud-based services now connected to on-premise systems create one workflow engine that integrates all systems and allows users to visualize data across multiple platforms.

Want to learn more about how cloud-services and hybrid cloud solutions can benefit your organization?

C L O U D

In addition to making the transition simpler, the strategies software companies are using to support hybrid cloud environments come with a number of benefits:

SMBs don’t have the kind of security resources that the big software companies have. Microsoft, AWS, and others have enormous buying power to help keep their sites secure. As many businesses have learned, security is hard—and it’s not necessarily better just because you control it. In fact, security will often take a lower priority compared to mission-critical functionality for the business. If a new workflow process is critical to your business saving or making money, and every day you don’t fix it you lose $10,000, that’s going to take precedence over building up security features. There’s always going to be intense pressure on IT to deliver new functionality that increases profitability, and it’s always going to be a balancing act between growth and risk. Cloud-managed systems can relieve this pressure and put more resources into security because they spread the cost across millions of users.

The Bottom Line The deployment of hybrid cloud solutions helps companies carefully transition to the cloud without undergoing a massive migration that endangers their data and disrupts their business operations. The ultimate story arc of the hybrid cloud is that customers eventually move over, but it becomes a simpler, stepped process rather than a huge, overwhelming production.

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