Sentia: In five years the majority of our clients will be running business-critical applications in the public cloud

Digital transformation is taking the world of business by storm. At the centre of this trend is the need to move IT infrastructure from private cloud or on-premises hosting to public cloud services, like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Recent numbers from IDC (Nordic enterprise infrastructure spending forecast, 2017-2021) show a 20% increase annually in public cloud adoption in Denmark, surpassing traditional hardware and hosting by 2020. According to IDC (Worldwide Quarterly Cloud Infrastructure Tracker), public cloud spending is growing 59% year over year with private cloud accounting for an annual 28% increase. 

“Danish companies are among the best at adopting cloud technology in Europe, recent data shows us. Skilled partner companies like Sentia are crucial to drive this development. They work from an agile setup and mindset, which makes time-to-market faster and helps companies develop new services and move data to the cloud”, says Claus Jul Christiansen, director for Partners and Small, Medium and Corporate Accounts in Microsoft Denmark. 

Organisations cite their main reasons for transitioning to a public cloud as minimising maintenance costs, increasing control, security and compliance, building a more scalable foundation, and providing continuous access to leading technologies, in order to drive innovation and stay ahead of the competition. 

To reap the full rewards of the cloud’s scalability potential, Sentia advocates that businesses use the cloud as a starting point for their innovation, rather than migrating over technology from older infrastructure. This allows cloud-native technology to permeate the organisation and redefine its offerings to be more customer-focused. 

Global Alliance Director of Sentia’s strategic Microsoft partnership, Jakob Norup, says: “Moving to the public cloud is not trivial. Many competing technologies are available, and each choice will have a critical impact on the company’s ability to drive business innovation over the coming years. Being too dependent on your old IT infrastructure can slow down innovation and scalability.” 

At Sentia, both private and public consumption is growing and with so many companies currently undergoing transitions, there is a crucial need for expertise in how to make the switch efficiently. One possible solution is to have a wide range of experts on board during the process, but these “come in short and expensive supply in such a heated IT labour market”, according to Jakob Norup. 

Sentia has mobilized a great amount of cloud expertise within AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud solutions to launch ‘Landing Zone’: a framework that allows businesses to move to the public cloud in a simpler way, using technology choices that fit both their strategy and unique business needs. 

“Landing Zone is the result of six months’ work to enable our clients to benefit from the scalability of the public cloud – both in the short and long term. Making the wrong choices at this stage could result in the development of an IT infrastructure that inhibits business growth further down the line, rather than one that is more agile and flexible”, Jakob Norup says. 

“So far, the approach is working: our clients tell us that they see us as an addition to their team, increasing their in-house capabilities, and we solve 90% of their issues at the first point of contact. We provide the foundation for their infrastructure, let them control all their data and protect their organisation, so that they can foster innovation and ultimately lead the way in their industry.”