Want to Rapidly and Accurately Estimate a Tailored Cloud Solution? Here’s How.
Between 2006 and 2013, cloud adoption was primarily driven by a desire to extract costs from datacenter operations. We’ve already written about how, today, enterprises are leveraging cloud platform capabilities to move faster and increase business innovation. Vendors provide platform capabilities to reduce commoditization, and organizations seek to diversify cloud providers to reduce lock-in.
That’s a lot to take in. So, where do you begin?
Rather than prescribe a solution, we tailor what’s right for your organization.
- Do you want a single cloud provider?
- Or are you looking to go hybrid — both an on-premise datacenter and a cloud component?
- Or are you looking at multiple cloud solutions?
Our solutions focus on portability, not lock-in. Lock-in means you’re stuck with that provider. Portability means you can move from one cloud provider to another. Sure, AWS does some things better than Azure, and Azure does some things better than AWS, but the preference more often than not is like choosing an iPhone versus an Android. One platform may be better for you; we just need to know the requirements first. For example, if you have Office 365, and you use all .NET developers, then Azure is probably the route to go.
But our cloud workshops extend beyond cloud capability itself, as we also drill down on the business context of your solution:
- What do you expect to gain immediately?
- What do you expect to gain long-term?
For example, maybe you’d like to immediately put the developer environment in the cloud for flexibility and burstability, but you want the production environment to come later, in the long-term.
Or maybe, in the immediate, you want only brand-new things in the cloud, with the refactoring of old applications in the long-term.
Our cloud adoption workshop seeks to answer, at a high level, the organizational impact of the cloud and the reason you’re migrating. We have an extensive toolbox to analyze current-state processes, root causes, capabilities and gaps, and it’s these that we vet against future-state processes and system requirements — thus rapidly defining scope and accurately estimating on a large scale.
Our Rapid Process Map (RPM) is a proprietary tool for identifying business impact and key projects.
With cloud, we consider six groups of stakeholder perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security and operations. This helps stakeholders understand how to update skills, adapt existing processes and introduce new processes to take maximum advantage of the services provided by cloud computing. These perspectives can be divided into themes like:
Budget
Partnerships
Strategy
Compliance
Which we would tailor according to your needs.
And once we’ve determined the scope and boundaries, we feed them back to your stakeholders to ensure everything is accurate.
Our tools for progressive elaboration lead to solutions that become more and more accurate as they move forward, and are built upon metrics that ensure consistency, transparency and traceability. That’s why we can confidently say we can meet your organization anywhere you are on your cloud journey today. Drop us a line.
