Managing Evergreen Cloud Services

As cloud services such as Microsoft 365 become the norm, it is understandable to see how the promise of reducing operational overheads whilst providing the latest and greatest versions of software is indeed enticing.

However, embracing evergreen technology and the speed at which updates and new features are released, comes with the increasingly important task of ensuring that we are aware of what, how, when and why these updates are being released.

But why is that the case?

The whole concept of cloud services is that it removes the overhead of managing costly and resource intensive on-premise servers, replacing them with infrastructure and services provided and managed by the vendor.

We're not all the same

Well firstly, not all organisations are the same. For instance, in the world of Microsoft 365 not everyone is licensed for all of the 70+ products included within the M365 portfolio. Some are licensed but simply don't make use of all of the available features, whereas others may be prevented from deploying certain features or technology for compliance and security reasons.

Secondly, we don't live in a perfect world where one cloud vendor provides all of our services. We have relationships and requirements for different solutions from different vendors, meaning we also have a need for integration across products. Changes to one cloud service may impact that of another.

All this points to the fact that we as the customer cannot indiscriminately allow every update to pervade our environments. We need to collate, categorise, review, understand, and action updates individually, and do this in a timeframe imposed by the vendor.

The Impact of Managing Microsoft 365 Change

The following data is extracted from multiple Microsoft 365 tenants that we monitor. It includes all updates distributed between 1st January-30th November 2024, and if nothing else, highlights the impact that the influx of M365 change has on time, resource and budgets.

Total of 2,080 Message Center updates

• 719 had a high impact on end users

• 690 had a high impact on the IT admin team

• 630 categorised as 'Plan for Change' - require action to avoid disruption to service from planned changes
  
  
• 96 categorised as 'Prevent or Fix' - require action to avoid disruption to service from known cloud issues

The above highlights the significant number of items to identify, review, categorise, understand, action and report on. Without a proper process in place, ideally one cohesive with the Microsoft Maturity Model, it is inevitable that some of these updates will be missed, and as a result, an organisation will likely witness some sort of negative, service impacting experience.

Find out how to manage the Microsoft 365 Message Center using Planner here.

Moving to the Cloud Does Not Reduce the Workload

So, as we can see moving to the cloud does not reduce the effort of those responsible for delivering a stable and effective IT environment. You could even say it increases the workload and the need for product owners to remain vigilant and aware of what the roadmap for each M365 product has in store.

I guess that's the trade-off to having an evergreen estate. Organisation are moving from a well-being of on-premise servers to managing the flow and impact of daily updates to the products and services they consume via Microsoft 365 and the cloud.