IT departments are continuously being asked to do more with less. Kizama’s experts will identify waste in your IT Operations and provide solutions to increase productivity and optimize your environment.  As we provide increased efficiencies to your IT Operations we will focus on:

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  • Infrastructure Virtualization/Consolidation
  • Infrastructure Modernization
  • Software rationalization
  • Third Party licensing and maintenance cost optimization
  • Streamlining Infrastructure Operations and Process

At Kizama, we understand that IT organizations are often faced with new technologies that promise to increase performance, quality and reliability at a much lower TCO. We know that your resources are often consumed by the day to day demands of IT including releases, new code/functionality, patching and ongoing operations. Any successful IT organization needs to be able to vet new technologies and determine if the solution or technology has a practical benefit. Kizama will help manage your technology POCs bringing the required technical experience and a well defined process. A Kizama managed POC will not only provide evidence supporting the solution/technology and its benefits but will investigate what it will take to support, maintain and scale the product in your environment. Kizama wants to make sure that the TCO is well understood before a decision is made to move forward. Kizama POC processes include the following considerations and deliver the following outcomes with a non-biased approach:

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  • Project scope is well understood, and goal is to solve for specific problems and use cases and not to solve for everything
  • Defined timeline once pre-requisites are in place
  • Kizama will include resources from our clients to participate in the POC to allow for a greater degree of collaboration as we identify and narrow down the acceptance criteria
  • Final readout with recommendation on POC results
  • Documentation

While the primary goal of the POC is to determine the functionality of a given technology/solution, Kizama is aware our clients might want other considerations vetted and analyzed within the scope of the POC. Architects at Kizama possess a broad range of technical backgrounds and skillsets and are uniquely qualified to perform POCs across just as broad of a range of technologies. Some areas where we can bring immediate benefits to you based on our experience are:

Office 365

• Objective/Envisioning
  • What are the organizational goals of the POC
  • What is the organizational understanding of O365
  • Determine if the POC will be implemented in production or development
  • What are the organizational roadblocks to cloud
• Active Directory Assessment
  • Assess on-prem complexity
  • Domains and Trusts
  • Object counts and cleanup

Azure

• Objective/Envisioning
  • What are the organizational goals of the POC
  • What is the organizational understanding of Azure
  • What is the current infrastructure footprint
  • What are the organizational roadblocks to cloud

Running infrastructure in the cloud allows IT organizations to provide on-demand resources that are highly scalable and highly available without incurring large capitol costs. However leveraging the cloud brings new challenges and complexity to your environment: security concerns, integration and migration challenges, compliance, governance/access control, performance tuning, managing multiple clouds, containing costs, avoiding vendor lock-in. Using the cloud effectively requires a solid strategy and plan. Not everything can, or should, be run in the cloud. Kizama’s resources can help you devise an appropriate cloud strategy.

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  • We evaluate your current business processes to determine what would benefit the most from being in the cloud
  • We help devise an ideal cloud model based on your needs – hybrid, public, or private
  • We ensure your cloud model is optimized and aligned with your budget
  • We help you implement a cloud strategy that avoids vendor lock-in

Data Center migrations are part of many IT organizations life cycle and the ability to execute them efficiently has a great impact on availability, uptime and operational budget. IT organizations engage in migrations for many reasons including:

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  • Improving efficiency
  • Reducing footprint post mergers/acquisitions
  • Adoption of new capabilities in the public cloud
  • Resolving for real estate requirements
  • Resolving for Security and Network limitations
  • Reducing operational cost

Kizama helps your IT organization with a plan that includes all the data analysis and coordination.  Kizama’s migration plans have 2 main objectives:

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  • Minimize downtime
  • Maintain or improve performance

Kizama will help your IT organization through the critical phases of the Data Center migration planning:

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  • A full audit of the source Data Center and its applications, contacts, owners, material data
  • A full audit of the source infrastructure and an analysis of refresh and upgrade opportunities in the target
  • A mapping of destination in target datacenter
    • Virtualization opportunities and levels
    • Identification of destination targets based on workloads
  • Planning and scheduling actual migrations
  • Best practices

IT environments are becoming increasingly large and complex. The ability to automate is critical to enable IT organizations to effectively deploy, manage, standardize and monitor their environments. Effective automation is the critical building block that allows companies to finally achieve control over technology sprawl. Kizama’s resources are experts at designing effective automation frameworks that are tailored to meet your environment’s specific needs and challenges.

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  • We evaluate your current automation processes and identify strengths and weaknesses
  • Provide automation frameworks compatible with industry standards such as Ansible and SALT
  • Integrate any existing automation systems/processes
  • Ensure your automation framework can be used to manage all of your systems: Linux, Windows, legacy UNIX. One way to manage everything
  • Ensure your automation framework can support advanced capabilities such as software deployment, monitoring, alarming, configuration management and infrastructure as code

Today’s leading organizations are moving away from on premise implementations of the Microsoft collaboration suite and adopting Office 365 ™ in order to capitalize on emerging trends and quickly leverage new features. Gone are the days where running your own collaboration suite gave you a competitive advantage. At Kizama, we believe that any approach to adopt Office 365 ™ needs to be grounded in the business processes of the organization and not just driven as an IT objective. We have adopted an approach based on successful implementations that include but are not limited to the following:

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  • Business objective assessment
  • Security assessment
  • Network assessment
  • Application suite evaluation
  • AzureAD implementation
  • Deployment

Architects at Kizama have experience in designing and deploying multi million dollar per year Azure solutions.  We take a cloud native approach that optimizes your application platforms and identifies workloads that belong in the cloud. Through our IT Optimization services, we can also help you get the most out of those assets that remain on premise. Some of the key imperatives to focus on when looking at starting or furthering your Azure adoption are:

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  • Security assessment
  • Network assessment
  • Authentication methods
  • Separation of duties and Azure Access Control
  • Applications and development groups to POC
  • Production deployment
  • Value optimization and departmental consumption