Cloud Computing Consulting Services
Elliot Daly
Cloud computing companies such as Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services are a popular choice of technology leaders for running their business operations. Clearly, most companies are looking for a trusted cloud computing consultant for managing their cloud operations, as well as, providing advice and insights for finding an ideal SaaS solution for their business.
There are large number of firms providing cloud consulting services and CIOs are faced with a difficult task in selecting the right cloud computing consultants to suit their business vertical. According to Gartner, the value of the public cloud services market will be around $332 billion by the end of 2021 and the demand for top-quality cloud computing consulting services in the cloud computing market will increase too.
Cloud Strategic Trends
Cloud solutions are used by most of us in some way or the other these days, either while using Gmail services or the use of cloud storage for photos and other digital media. Traditionally, for most large enterprises, “Cloud” has been used for email services and other self-contained Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, such as Salesforce or Dynamics.
Over the last few years Peru Consulting has also seen a steady rise of digital transformation efforts and with it, a focus on DevOps ways of working driving cloud adoption for handling CI/CD models, increased automation, containerised apps and microservice architectures. These “new” approaches have an increasing need for more robust security, resilience and elastic type services where large amounts of resources are needed for relatively short periods of time.
Another trend we see is in who is procuring cloud services; you may think that this remains the preserve of IT departments, however, Peru has seen this become less the norm as business and operational teams become more aware of cloud managed services and have the budget and autonomy to select and use services as they see fit.
The problem with this, from an IT perspective, is the increase in complexity of the estate and the ongoing cost of maintaining what are generally tactical solutions. Over the last 12 months undertaking application rationalisation projects, we see hundreds of procured applications with their own processes, data siloes and duplicated capabilities which IT departments are being asked to look after with the same number of resources and budgets.
More importantly, ensuring value for money from your multi-cloud providers is a major challenge, are you really seeing the promised higher value at a lower cost? How can your business ensure that it’s driving out cost in the long term not adding to it?
The Peru Consulting team believes it is vital that IT leaders set the Cloud agenda from the start: building, as part of an effective Cloud transformation strategy, costed contracting strategies and creating effective service management and service reporting regimes before cloud migration is even considered.
Cloud Migration
In order to take full advantage of the efficiency and agility of the cloud, businesses cannot simply “move” their legacy systems from an on-premise to a cloud environment, nor does it make sense to rebuild the entire application estate “cloud native” as this would be extremely time consuming and expensive. How then can organisations ensure they succeed in their transformation into the cloud?
In the experience of Peru, there are a number of key steps that underpin a successful cloud migration programme:
Develop your cloud strategy
Before starting on your migration process, establish what you want to accomplish. This starts with capturing baseline metrics of your IT infrastructure to map workloads to your assets and applications. Strategy development should be done early and in a way that prioritises business objectives over technology.
Identify the right applications
Not all applications are cloud-friendly and some will perform better on private or hybrid clouds rather than on a public cloud. A full assessment of your organisation’s architecture, complexity and implementation should be done ahead of the migration to inform the migration planning process. In assessing which applications to migrate to the cloud there are a number of key considerations:
- Which applications can be moved as-is, and which will require a re-engineering?
- If re-engineering is required, what is the level of complexity?
- Does your cloud provider have any services to enable migration without reconfiguring workloads?
- What is the return on investment for each application you will be migrating and what is the payback period?
- For applications where cloud migration is cost-effective and secure, which type of cloud environment is best — public, private, or multi-cloud?
Engage the right cloud provider
A key aspect of cloud adoption involves selecting a cloud computing services provider that can help provide migration services during the process and into ongoing managed service. In assessing the most appropriate cloud provider some key questions to ask include:
- What tools do they have available to help make the process easier?
- What is their level of experience?
- Can they support public, private, and multi-cloud environments at scale?
- How can they help you deal with complex architectures, or legacy technology and data migration processes?
- What level of support can they provide during the migration process?
Moving to the cloud is not simple. Consequently, the service provider you select should have proven experience that it can manage the complex tasks required to manage a cloud migration at a global scale.
Consider how data integrity and operational continuity will be maintained
Managing risk is critical, and sensitive data can be exposed during a cloud data migration. Post-migration validation of business processes is crucial to ensure that automated controls are producing the same outcomes without disrupting normal operations.
Execute your cloud migration
How you migrate to the cloud will be predicated on the complexity and architecture of your application(s) and your data architecture. You can move your entire application over, undertake the required testing, and then switch over your legacy systems traffic. Alternatively, you can take a more phase approach, moving workloads over, validating, and then continuing this process until all workloads are migrated to the cloud.
The Benefits of Cloud Migration
Moving data and applications to the cloud can bring your organisation significant advantages and measurable benefits. The scale of benefits achieved with cloud migration depends on the quality of your cloud migration strategy and cloud migration plan. Typical benefits include:
- Decreased hosting costs: You pay for the service and not for maintaining physical servers.
- Agility and scalability: Operational agility is a top reason for cloud adoption. Cloud services automatically scale capacity to your needs, ensure application updates and resolve issues remotely with minimum downtime.
- The cloud offers greater security than on-premises data centres. Regular security updates help you avoid security threats without having to deploy complex patch management solutions.
- Scalable resource use: Cloud server capacity scales up and down to fit your needs, so you only use the energy and resources necessary, thus reducing environmental impact.
- Disaster recovery: The cloud provides backup and recovery solutions that take less time and upfront investment than traditional on-premise-based disaster recovery.
Peru’s Cloud Migration Credentials
Peru has expertise and Cloud strategy consulting services developed as part of our Digital Business advisory services, from our Cloud Migration Strategy and Readiness Assessment through to Provider Benchmarking, Sourcing and Commercial support, Cloud operating model reviews and Cloud migration services. Contact us today to discuss.