Achieving Full Value from the Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft OMS

Moving to a hybrid cloud model is becoming an increasingly popular point of discussion for organizations across all industries. Once that model is up and running, it isn’t always clear what needs to be done to fully optimize it. This leaves organizations at risk of shortchanging themselves in terms of the benefits they should be experiencing from their environment.

Operations Management Suite (OMS) from Microsoft can ensure this doesn’t happen. OMS helps organizations explore new hybrid cloud capabilities and gain more control over their environment while also increasing security around it.

OMS consists of four Microsoft solutions: Operational Insights, Azure Backup, Azure Recovery and Azure Automation. These solutions can either be purchased together, as part of the OMS, or separately with their own pricing structure. Existing System Center users may be especially interested in the full suite.

Why?

Microsoft has elected to give System Center customers the option to bolt OMS onto their existing System Center deployment for a substantial discount. Customers can purchase discounted OMS licenses for every System Center data center license they have. So if you’ve got four System Center data center licenses, you can buy four OMS licenses as well.

Here’s what OMS can do for you

One element of OMS that most often catches the eye of customers is Operational Insights. This is because it is, in essence, a log analytics solution which is on par with some of the more expensive offerings out there. The big difference between Operational Insights and others in the log analytics sphere is that it’s cloud based. Whereas other solutions require servers on which to store logs and data, with Operational Insights, the logs go right to the cloud.

Operational Insights gives you dashboards depicting the status of your environment. For example, it will show you whether your Active Directory is in a healthy state just by analyzing the Active Directory logs. Then it can make recommendations based on what it finds in the logs. The important thing to remember is that while it is powerful, Operational Insights isn’t a replacement for regular health assessments of, say, your Active Directory. Instead, it’s the kind of thing that will keep you in good shape between health assessments.

The upsides of OMS go beyond Operational Insights. Let’s take a look at what else it can offer:

• Improved time to value. IT needs a solution that will get up and running quickly, not one that’s going to heap even more work on its plate before delivering any true business value. OMS fits happily into that first category. It’s possible to roll out in seconds and to start collecting meaningful, actionable insights and data in just hours. Also, a wizard-driven experience allows new features or servers to be effortlessly added.
• Increased ease of management. OMS increases the efficiency of IT teams by giving them a single, unified view of your entire corporate IT infrastructure. Gone are the days when multiple tools and interfaces were required to stay on top of varied assets. OMS covers all workloads, regardless of whether they’re stored on site or in the cloud. Even better, the solution will stay up-to-date on its own, furthering simplifying the process of managing it.
• Lessened threat of downtime, lost data. With OMS, Azure becomes your disaster recovery site. It houses apps and sensitive data securely in the cloud instead of on legacy storage solutions. Should something need to be recovered, it can be pulled down directly from Azure. In addition, Azure can be used to test out production apps before they go live and, in the event of a compute capacity crunch, workloads can be migrated onto Azure to free up bandwidth elsewhere.
• Enhanced System Center. OMS works great with or without System Center. But, if you already have System Center running, you will notice even more value. Not only does OMS integrate seamlessly with System Center, it provides access to new capabilities and tools all geared towards a more robust management experience.

What comes next?

Ready to bring OMS to your organization? Have more questions? Reach out to us at www.arrayasolutions.com/contact-us. You’ll be put in touch with one of our Account Executives as well as a member of our award-winning Microsoft practice. They can answer whatever questions you may have and get you on the road to elevating your IT team and your organization.

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