Evergreen IT keeps your cloud platform up and running

Our new ways of working and fast-changing world are challenging the IT environment. It needs to constantly evolve so that your business doesn't fall victim to new digital security threats and lose productivity. Evergreen IT is one way to meet this challenge and harness the potential of your IT platform.

And it's bigger than you think!

Keep your lawn green

Evergreen IT has nothing to do with the company that sells lawns, but lawns is actually a pretty good analogy. Taking care of your IT environment is like watering your lawn: if you water a little but often, it stays green all the time. If you wait too long, it will wither. Evergreen IT means continuously keeping your IT platform up-to-date through small, frequent updates and iterative improvements to everything from operating systems and clients to applications.

In the past, it was more common for companies to have their own data centre and run everything themselves at their own pace. Which meant that they kept going for four or five years until it was no longer sustainable and they had to undertake a large and expensive IT project to catch up. In addition to migrations, upgrades and new products, IT staff and users had to be trained. It was a lot to learn at once, which was rarely received with ovations. And the more technological developments accelerated, the more the company had time to catch up between upgrades.

Today, many have their IT platform in the cloud, and it's even faster. Cloud platforms like Microsoft 365 and Azure are constantly evolving, pushing out new updates and products every month in a never-ending stream.

The problem is that although many of the updates are automatic, you can't just sit back and enjoy the wonders of technology. Many of them require human decisions and actions. Someone has to decide which of the new apps, security protocols, and network features your particular organization should have. Those that are selected then often need to be manually configured and activated, and employees informed and trained.

No wonder your business is not keeping up. But it can have bigger consequences than you might think.

What happens when your IT falls behind?

Here are five consequences of neglecting your tech lawn.

• Security risks. Microsoft analyses new security threats every month and introduces new security updates to Microsoft 365 to combat them, but to keep your IT environment safe, someone needs to keep track of the updates and take action on an ongoing basis.

• Non-compliance. GDPR and other regulatory requirements are changing rapidly and if users and platforms don't keep up, you risk compliance.

• Risk of becoming a climate villain. Microsoft keeps track of its customers' carbon footprint and helps them reduce it - but only if you use the tools the platform has to do so.

• Large, unpredictable IT costs. A big-bang project every three years to make up for backlogged maintenance risks being difficult to budget and involving expensive consultancy services.

• Inefficiency and lost productivity. Users are unable to take advantage of new technologies and the ways of working they enable, from new apps to automation and AI support.

The issue is therefore not just technical, but highly critical to operations. Because the risk is that if your competitors unleash the full potential of their IT platform, you risk being left behind.

But the solution, thankfully, is not far away.

You're sitting on a gold mine

Evergreen IT means keeping tools and processes up-to-date at all times. That way, you avoid large update projects, reduce security risks and give your employees the support they need to work efficiently.

The good news is that if you have Microsoft 365, you already have all the tools you need.

The platform is based on the experience of a lot of companies that you can benefit from, as the users have proven to be very similar.

In short, the Microsoft 365 platform tracks and analyses emerging security threats, your organisation's IT usage and network performance. Based on the analysis, it then identifies problems and needs and continuously recommends concrete actions to help you facilitate best-practice.

By keeping your platform green all year round, the whole company gets much more out of it.

So while it's not easy to keep up with the cloud, there are more opportunities than ever for those who know how to leverage their IT and keep it in tune.

Read more: how to keep your Microsoft 365 environment green and comfortable

Learn more about our Microsoft 365 Evergreen service