Embrace Cloud Technology to Accelerate Growth
Cloud Infrastructure Services
Whether you’re seeking an on-premise, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure, DCG can help modernize and re-architect your existing applications for cloud-enabled integration and scalability using Azure. How can we turn your vision into reality?
I am ready to…
Implement a Cloud Infrastructure
Optimize My Cloud Infrastructure
Migrate and Maintain My Cloud Infrastructure
Implement a Cloud Infrastructure with DCG
So, you’ve done your research and are ready to take advantage of the benefits of the Cloud, but you’re not sure what it entails and how to implement it successfully – right? We get it. Over the years, we’ve helped organizations of every size explore the complexities and benefits of Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and the benefits the Cloud provides as a whole. Then, we took it a step further by partnering with them to help implement the Cloud technologies successfully.
Explore Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Azure’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is no mystery to DCG consultants. Our deep experience in both on-premise and cloud data center technologies helps our clients and partners design and implement the best solutions for their organization, whether it’s on-premise, cloud, or hybrid. Through strategic assessments of your unique business needs, our team of dedicated experts will ensure your organization is taking full advantage of cloud offerings like resource utilization, cost savings, flexible data storage, robust disaster recovery, and network extension.
With DCG’s expertise, you can effectively leverage Azure Compute to utilize dedicated Linux or Windows virtual machines or other compute services like Kubernetes (AKS), ACI, and more to transform your infrastructure. This allows for applications that still need to be hosted on dedicated servers to be transitioned into the cloud. Let us help you by scaling resources as you need them as well as identifying cost savings over time with sizing and reservations.
Azure Storage services are built with high availability and performance in mind, and DCG has the expertise to ensure your organization is using them effectively. Our team can teach you how to store hot, cold, and archive data in a variety of datacenters around the world while controlling the resiliency by replicating that data between multiple regions as needed. We can teach you how to control the access for many different scenarios. We’ll even consult with you on how to replace traditional file servers and tie authentication back to Active Directory through Azure Files.
The proper architecture for any solution is important for meeting high uptime requirements, but it is also key to meet recoverability requirements in the case of an outage or other type of incident. Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery are two among many other BCDR focused services that DCG can implement to help your organization meet even very strict RTOs and RPOs. Let us help you design a robust disaster recovery and business continuity plan for your infrastructure and applications.
With more than 165,000 miles of private fiber, Microsoft allows you to extend your on-premises network technologies or shift them to cloud infrastructure through Azure Networking. From high availability and enterprise grade security to low-latency experience so that you can stay connected whether you are on premise, fully cloud, or in a hybrid environment. The DCG team has extensive experience in even the most complex network architectures and can help you design and implement the optimal solution for your organization.
We know it’s essential to balance security with productivity. That’s why our dedicated consultants are ready to help you implement Azure Virtual Desktop. This service enables organizations to quickly deploy virtual PCs or deliver applications to remote users in a secure and scalable manner. We have deep experience in overall Azure Architecture as well as designing and deploying AVD solutions that enables us to tailor to the specific use case of your business. To take it a step further, we also have experience in cost optimization and operational automation of AVD.
Find Out How AMECO Transformed Their IT in 90 Days
AMECO, a Site Services® company dedicated to simplifying site execution complexities with numerous offices and project sites, had 90 days to separate and create new IT infrastructure, processes, and data during a divestiture. To get the job done right and on time, they called in DCG. The goal was to not only move from one infrastructure to another but also plan and consult them on the long-term sustainability of their new venture. After a successful go live, here’s what the client achieved:
- Migrated databases, applications, files, and more out of physical infrastructure and onto new servers in Azure
- Deployed new on-premise network equipment and firewalls
- Moved from legacy phone systems to Teams
- Configured new laptops for all employees with ready-to-use email and SharePoint
- Removed legacy CRM and implemented Dynamics 365 for Sales
- Designed IT policies, disaster recovery plans, security policies, and more
Explore Platform as a Service (PaaS)
In addition to IaaS, you can lean on DCG’s breadth of knowledge to fully utilize Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. We’ll help you strike the right balance of flexibility of features, optimized cost, and operational effort. We’ll provide you with customized recommendations that allow you to stop worrying about patching and maintenance and focus more on your applications and data. Whether you’re interested in Azure SQL Database /Managed Instance or App Services, DCG will help you migrate to these services and realize the ROI on this crucial piece of cloud-native digital transformation.
Make Your Database Cloud Native
By partnering with DCG, you can take full advantage of Azure SQL Database / Managed Instances benefits. We’ll help you lower operational effort, capitalize on responsive scaling, and reduce complexity for high availability - all with little to no changes to your data or applications.
Streamline Your Web Application Code
DCG understands that sometimes you just need your web application code to run. With our knowledge of App Services, we’ll help you streamline these efforts, allowing you to focus on the code of your application without worrying about operating system maintenance.
Whether you’re looking to take advantage of virtual machines through Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or focused on web applications without cloud maintenance through Platform as a Service (PaaS), DCG has the skills and resources you need to get the most out of your technology spend.
Identity and Security Benefits of the Cloud
As your trusted partner for identity infrastructure security, DCG can analyze and provide specific recommendations on several components that comprise key areas of your security posture. In addition, DCG can incorporate effective strategies to compare your implementation against similar size organizations within the same industry. Get a feel for the benefits the Cloud offers and how DCG can provide support every step of the way.
Strengthen Your Credentials
DCG knows password-based attacks on user identities are the most prevalent vector of identity compromise, outpacing emerging attack techniques like consent phishing and attacks on nonhuman identities. Our team of experts is ready to share how to successfully implement invaluable tools like Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Defender for Identity, and more. Additionally, we're ready to show you how to eliminate passwords altogether with passwordless authentication using Windows HELLO. When it comes to strong credentials, we have your back.
Reduce Your Attack Surface Area
We can guide your organization on disabling the use of older, less secure protocols, limiting access entry points, moving to cloud authentication, and exercising more significant control of administrative access to resources and embracing Zero Trust security principles. Specifically, we’ll leverage Microsoft products like Cloud/Legacy Authentication, Invalid entry points, Privilege Access Management (PIM), Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Graph API to ensure your attack surface is limited.
Automate Threat Response
In our experience, automatically intercepting attacks and removing the latency between detection and response reduces the time criminals use to embed themselves into your environment – saving organizations time and money. We’ll guide your organization in using sign-in risk policies, Risk Security policy, Conditional Access policies, M365 Defender (Endpoint, Office 365, Identity, Cloud Apps), Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), and Monitoring and Alerts to ensure your organization is ready for an attack at any moment.
Utilize Cloud Intelligence
We provide consultations on how to use security logs and reports to create electronic records of suspicious activities and help you detect patterns that may indicate attempted or successful external penetration of the network, and internal attacks. We’ll teach you how to use auditing to monitor user activity, document regulatory compliance, do forensic analysis, and more. In addition to setting up alerts to provide notifications of security events, we’ll work with you to make sure you have a log retention policy in place for both your sign-in logs and audit logs for Azure AD.
Moving From Dreaming to Implementing with a Cloud Roadmap
DCG is well-versed in the entire project lifecycle for Azure new deployments and can build a roadmap at any scale, from implementing a single, small solution to a full-scale digital transformation. As a first step, we will work to understand your business, identifying the business impacts of the processes, communications, and the steps required to reach your desired end state. Then we’ll design the most effective combination of cloud services to help you accelerate your business and improve collaboration. With our experience in Agile and Waterfall project methodologies, we can implement solutions across a wide range of cloud technologies using best practice architectures, handle both simple and highly complex scenarios, and design for a global scale, with high availability if needed.
Optimize Your Cloud Infrastructure to Save Costs
DCG knows infrastructure is an investment, and it’s critical to have good stewardship of that investment. To ensure you aren’t paying more than you need for your cloud infrastructure, we’ll guide you on how to provide the resources that are sized appropriately and that you are taking advantage of any price breaks or scaling techniques such as reserved instances, scale sets, autoscaling, etc. In addition, we can help redesign your applications and workloads to use cloud native technologies and architectures to save on cost while improving reliability and scalability.
The cloud is not just a different place to run the same virtual servers, it is a different model of operating and a different set of tools to design and deploy scalable and flexible applications and infrastructure. Redesigning the architecture for an application or system to use more cost-effective cloud native solutions can be costly, but it can also pay dividends in the long term when operational costs and reliability are considered. Azure cloud native solutions such as Azure SQL, App Services, Application Gateway, Front Door, etc. are cost effective ways to host scalable applications and infrastructure. DCG has the expertise to help transform your application landscape to utilize these cloud native technologies and tools.
When migrating to the cloud, infrastructure and services cost is a very important factor. On-premise infrastructure is purchased as a capital expense, putting less pressure on optimizing how many CPU cores or RAM is used by a given server or application. In the cloud, consumption is everything when it comes to cost, so it is important to get resource allocation very close to what is needed to maintain performance while also reducing cost. This is true across both IaaS and PaaS offerings. DCG recognizes the importance of right sizing to reduce overall operating costs and can provide the expertise needed to make the appropriate adjustments.
Discover the Best Practices We Can Help You Implement
We employ a wide range of tools that align with these strategies to limit and detect threats, make sign-on easier, and set your users up for success.
Turn on Conditional Access
Windows Hello for Business
B2B/B2C
Enable Password Management
Plan for Routine Security Improvements
Treat Identity as Primary Security Perimeter
Centralize Identity Management
Enforce Multi-Factor Verification for Users
Use Role-Based Access Control
Lower Exposure of Privileged Accounts
Control Locations Where Resources are Located
Use Azure AD for Storage Authentication
Manage Connected Tenants (AAD Connect)
Enable
Single Sign-On
Secure Your Infrastructure Against Threats and Vulnerabilities
Security is a critical component of every project or implementation, and it’s far more than just turning on a specific service. To ensure your infrastructure is secure, we can utilize a wide range of security strategies, policies, and solutions to meet your organization’s needs. This includes leveraging Microsoft’s Azure feature, which has several components woven into Azure identity management and access control security best practices. These components are centered on the protection of user accounts since these are one of the most critical components of your security and yet one of the most difficult to protect. We have extensive experience designing and implementing tailored strategies to keep your user accounts secure while still allowing your users to get work done. Our expertise includes enterprise-scale architecture and configuration of both Azure and Active Directory.
Zero-Trust is the new standard in network security design – every request encrypted and authenticated. We can help protect sensitive systems to only allow the necessary access while ensuring applications remain available. This is getting more complex as our mobile and connectivity requirements evolve, but DCG has the skills and experience to make this possible. A good network architecture will utilize Network Security Groups (NSGs) to only allow the necessary ports to be accessed as well as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and other network security services. For Applications that have limited authentication or encryption capabilities we can also utilize services like Azure Application Proxy to provide the necessary layer of encryption and authentication.
One of the most valuable assets for any company is its data (financial, inventory, personnel, etc.) Ensuring that data is available, untampered with, and protected from unauthorized access is a serious concern. In addition, you have range of legal and compliance requirements to take into consideration. We can help you meet these needs related to data security, integrity, and compliance. We employ solutions such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Azure Information Protection (AIP), tagging, data classifications, Access Packages, network security and encryption settings on Azure Storage, Defender for Storage, and more to protect your sensitive data. This must also be coupled with a deep understanding of the strategies and processes to protect your data.
In order to help your organization comply with legal and regulatory demands, DCG is able to offer guidance as well as assist in implementing solutions. Some of these solutions include retention policies, eDiscovery and legal hold, long term archiving, Multi-Geo tenants, and more.
An important question to answer related to cyber security is, “If you had a security breach, how would you know?” SIEM tools like Azure Sentinel help to detect potential security issues and alert, or even automatically respond to them. DCG has the expertise to implement Sentinel and train your team to utilize and respond to alerts.
DCG has experience designing, testing, and implementing Business Continuity and Disaster Recover (BCDR) solutions. We can help you protect your critical business systems and data from the effects of failures, outages, accidents, malicious acts, and more by utilizing technologies such as Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, storage replication, data sync, database replication, and many more.
In addition to security, you also need to protect your company from other issues that may cause your data and applications to be unavailable. Azure Monitor can actively watch for any issues and alert if thresholds are reached or an application is unavailable. It is also possible to integrate this with other automation capabilities for self-healing. DCG can help you modernize your operational tools and processes using these cloud native services.
Take Ownership of Your Infrastructure with Assessments and Training Sessions
Now that you’ve implemented your Cloud infrastructure, it’s time to make the most of your technology spend. DCG can provide assessments and security and compliance-specific projects where we can help to understand your security landscape and make plans to increase your security posture. Additionally, DCG can deliver focused and flexible workshops and trainings targeted at specific Azure and Microsoft 365 technologies to help your team understand possible solutions and how to effectively operate them. Finally, validating their skills via a certification will give them the confidence boost they need.
Implement Your Migration with Purpose
Our teams are experts in all types of migrations. We can handle tenant–to–tenant migrations that often occur during major business changes such as acquisitions, divestitures, mergers, and restructures. We can also handle migrations from on-premises to Azure, Microsoft 365, or other cloud providers. Migrations can be some of the most complex projects, but we have the experience to perform these while minimizing the impact on your business operations.
Cloud Projects We Can Migrate for You
Infrastructure
Virtual Machines (VMs)
Networks
Firewalls
Remote Access Solutions
VPN
Virtual Desktops
Application Delivery
M365 Services
Email/Exchange
Teams, SharePoint
OneDrive
SQL/Databases
SQL VMs
SQL Databases
SQL Managed Instances
Support Your Infrastructure Through Break Fix and Proactive Engagements
A great support team ensures your infrastructure can operate at scale. DCG’s Microsoft Certified engineers, developers, and architects provide a full suite of support services, including access to our 24x7x365 support team.
We provide reactive support. Our team is there for break-fix issues. With a 24x7x365 support team, your support request will receive the attention it deserves. We can also assist with Microsoft escalations and drive them to completion, including high severity cases. Our SMEs are able to assist with any supported Microsoft technology.
We have a support team staff available 24×7. When the sun sets in the Western Hemisphere there is a team ready to take over in the Eastern Hemisphere. We refer to this as the Follow the Sun support model.
Our team can provide proactive support. This includes handling software updates, licensing updates, certificate updates, and any needed system upgrades. Also, we provide training sessions for your team. These sessions include how-to sessions, best practice sessions, and educational sessions. If you have us do evaluations on needed and future changes, we offer this under our proactive services. Our teams have a proactive culture that is consistently looking for root causes and proactive solutions to improve your business systems.
Already have an onsite IT team? Fortify their efforts with DCG’s 24x7x365, follow the sun support. With our experience, we have the leverage to support any environment and any case needing assistance. Our team is geared to take on reactive and proactive support cases with the ability to assist with your Microsoft Escalations.
Start Your Enhancements with an Infrastructure Assessment
Allow our consultants to perform a structured review of your existing Azure and Microsoft 365 environments with recommendations for improvement. This can be used for road mapping and IT strategy. This is also commonly used to reduce risk and accelerate an upcoming IT project. Rather than signing for a large IT project up front, this allows our clients and us to understand their environment and needs much deeper so that a future project can be scoped and planned with a high degree of confidence. This includes a written report to capture the information that is gathered.
Why Partner with DCG
DCG is a team of consultants you can trust. With 500+ successful projects and implementations, we know how to assess and gather information about your current infrastructure and business needs to help you determine the best fit for your infrastructure. In addition, we can assist with building a project roadmap to meet your goals, implement the changes that need to occur, and deliver workshops and training along the way to help educate your teams. We’ve used our proven methods to help 150+ companies achieve their business goals, and your organization could be next!