Microsoft environments are ever evolving, adding complexity to your customers’ already complex IT environments – a trend that also increases risk.
According to Gartner’s 2019 Market Guide for Cloud Office Migration Tools, more than 70% of business users will be substantially provisioned with cloud office capabilities by 2021. In fact, most organisations are somewhere in their journey to the cloud, and Office 365 now has 200 million commercial monthly active users. We face:
- Undeniable cloud expansion
- Unparalleled data growth
- Unforeseen security and compliance issues
- Unprecedented mergers and acquisition.
- Nearly 60% of sensitive data stored in the cloud is in Office 365. Add in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), divestitures, and organisations seeking to leverage the benefits of cloud-based collaboration services – and the scale and volume of cloud Office 365 migrations is ever-increasing.
Security is a top concern
We know data breaches are the new norm. New and increasingly stringent compliance regulations make security and compliance more important than ever. Microsoft estimates 95 million AD accounts are under cyberattack every day - because of its critical importance in authentication and authorisation.
While many businesses invest in perimeter defences like firewalls and anti-virus software to keep their environment secure, AD security lags and a growing number of cyberattacks are actually insider attacks. Some organisations choose to throw more money and resources at the problem; however this isn’t efficient or sustainable for teams that are already stretched trying to tackle migrations and consolidations.
In addition, many companies handle migration and compliance issues separately from security, with native tools, point solutions or complex PowerShell scripts, but these methods are incredibly manual and error prone.
Challenges facing your customers
All this results in significant challenges for your customers who need to:
- Expand to the cloud faster without business disruption
- More easily predict cost and timing of migration projects and M&A integrations
- Secure their business and customer data or risk serious fines and/or reputation damage
- Continually prove and maintain compliance
- Minimise business disruptions and keep people working when the inevitable happens.
That’s a daunting list for any IT team, especially when considering how quickly organisations in Microsoft’s ecosystem are forced to evolve. Updates, releases and platforms going end of life are near constant, so there’s no room for error. Worse yet, managing these disparate processes and projects quickly leads to excessive and unpredictable costs. And all these touchpoints make your customers more prone to vulnerabilities and risk.
Why Quest?
Microsoft environments are quickly becoming unmanageable - and next is constant. The next merger or acquisition. The next Office 365 migration. The next compliance audit. The next AD security threat.
For nearly 20 years, companies have relied on Quest as their go-to partner for everything Microsoft. Quest is the only company with end-to-end solutions to address migration, management, and security challenges across any Microsoft platform - on prem, cloud or hybrid - including Active Directory and Office 365 workloads such as Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Exchange.
Gartner’s 2019 Market Guide for Cloud Office Migration Tools names Quest as the only vendor with 40 out of 40 features and functionality supported.
In summary, Quest helps:
MOVE: Whether moving to Office 365 or restructuring AD for M&As, migrations can take on a life of their own. With 30 years of experience, Quest has seen it all before, knows what to expect and how to react. Quest helps customers conquer their Microsoft migrations by making it a non-event for end users. The ZeroIMPACT migration and consolidation solutions help simplify migration planning, overcome unforeseen challenges, and finish projects faster.
MANAGE: Easily manage any Microsoft platform – on-prem, in the cloud or hybrid – with fewer screens, fewer scripts and more automation. Quest solutions help your customers save time and minimise security risks by automating the manual administration tasks that consume IT teams daily, including user and group management, Group Policy management, AD health monitoring, Office 365 license management, and disaster recovery planning.
SECURE: Perimeter defence is no longer enough, as Microsoft estimates 1.2 million Azure AD accounts are comprised every month. With Quest, your customers can secure their internal Microsoft environment as tightly as their perimeter, protecting the most critical and targeted assets and ensuring continuous regulatory compliance. They can strengthen their cyber resilience against the next hybrid AD and Office 365 security threat. Quest solutions will help to continually assess the environment to detect vulnerabilities, right size permissions, sound alarms faster with real-time auditing, watch the watchers with automated least privilege access control and security administration, respond rapidly when issues do arise, and recover from security incidents, outages or disasters.
Dicker Data & Quest
Dicker Data is the sole Quest distributor in New Zealand, working closely with IT resellers and the Quest team to simplify and solve customers’ toughest enterprise IT challenges.
With dedicated licensing specialists, BDMs, product managers and other experts, the Dicker Data Quest team quickly turns around quotes and purchases orders, assists with registration opportunities and ensures easy access to Quest solutions.
For more information contact our Cloud BDM’s today. Hayden Blackford (South Island) Josh Villaflor (Lower North Island) and Siva Ratna (Upper North Island)
