Infrastructure & Cloud Modernization

Infrastructure modernization can improve reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency. But modernization doesn't automatically mean replacing everything you have or moving every workload to the cloud.

MEA IT Strategy & Modernization helps organizations evaluate their current technology environment, determine where modernization creates meaningful business value, and develop a practical roadmap based on workload requirements, risk, operational needs, and total cost.

The goal is not cloud for the sake of cloud. It's the right technology in the right place for the right business reason.

MEA can help organizations evaluate infrastructure and cloud decisions across hybrid cloud and workload placement, Azure and VMware environments, data-center strategy, network modernization, compute and storage, end-user technology, operational tooling, lifecycle planning, and vendor or managed-service relationships.

The assessment looks beyond the technology itself to consider implementation costs, licensing, support, staffing, renewals, operational complexity, resilience, security, and expected business benefits.

Cloud strategies should evolve as business requirements, technology, and economics change.

In prior enterprise leadership, Michael led a hybrid-cloud modernization that integrated Azure VMware Solution (AVS) with an existing on-premises VMware environment. Selected workloads were shifted from native Azure services based on workload placement and cost considerations.

Actual spending was then compared with projected savings, resulting in an 18% reduction in cloud costs.

The lesson is straightforward: the best cloud architecture isn't necessarily the architecture with the most cloud.

It's the architecture that delivers the required combination of capability, reliability, security, flexibility, and cost.

MEA can also help organizations evaluate aging or overly complex infrastructure and develop modernization strategies that improve both performance and economics.

Michael's prior leadership experience includes modernization from DMVPN/MPLS to SD-WAN across more than 19 sites, resulting in a 50% reduction in circuit costs, as well as responsibility for Azure, VMware, compute, storage, Cisco networking, wireless infrastructure, and distributed technology operations.

Modernization planning can address architecture, lifecycle risk, resiliency, vendor dependencies, operational complexity, cost, supportability, and the sequencing required to make change without unnecessarily disrupting the business.

Modern infrastructure also has to work reliably after the transformation is complete.

MEA brings an operational perspective to modernization—considering monitoring, incident and problem management, root-cause analysis, disaster recovery, business continuity, service levels, documentation, and operational ownership as part of the strategy.

That approach is informed by prior environments where operational improvements contributed to 99.999% uptime, an 80% reduction in major incidents, incident SLA improvement from 85% to 97%, and request SLA improvement from 80% to 95%.

Experience also includes recovery planning and testing that achieved 100% RTO/RPO compliance within the established scope.

• Are we spending too much on cloud infrastructure?
• Should this workload be in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment?
• Is our current VMware strategy still sustainable?
• Do we need to modernize our network or data-center architecture?
• Where are our largest infrastructure lifecycle and resilience risks?
• Why are technology incidents continuing to affect the business?
• Are our vendors and managed-service providers delivering the value we expect?
• What should we modernize first?

A modernization engagement can begin with an assessment of the current environment and lead to a prioritized roadmap covering immediate risks, near-term improvements, longer-term investments, dependencies, cost considerations, and expected business outcomes.

MEA can help leadership distinguish between technology that genuinely needs to change and technology that continues to serve the organization effectively.

Modernization should solve a business problem—not create a new one.