Your people need to be connected, regardless of device, time or place

Two of the strongest reasons to book your move to the cloud are scalability and the pay-as-you-go model.

Scalability is there for you, on tap, without the need to spend capital on more servers, more storage, and more expense in IT implementation. On the cloud you simply pay for what you need, as you need it – whether you’re scaling up or scaling down. Your team will be connected – anytime, anywhere across multiple devices. And security for your precious data is built in, from multilayer user authentication and access permission control, to reliable backups which are updated in real time.

1. Team: Bringing all stakeholders to the table

To make the move to the cloud, you’ll need a highly experienced team – not just IT people. And if you’re moving applications to IaaS, business operations will be impacted, so we’ll need to bring the application owners into the team.

2. Discovery: Understanding you better than you understand yourself

You already understand your on-premises environment, but now you will discover things about it through the lens of cloud readiness. As an example, we need to understand how much data each application outputs (data egress), as this is charged for in the cloud.

3. Strategy: Decisions, decisions - we finalise the master plan

Will some applications run better and be more cost effective by migrating them to Platform as a Service (PaaS), or should you simply lift-and-shift them to the cloud? For example, why deploy SQL Server on a VM in Azure, when you can use Azure SQL Database and save the management overhead associated with VMs. We’ll dive deep and offer advice, guidance and expert analysis with you at its centre

4. Migration plan: We dot the i’s and cross the t’s, a roadmap built for success

How will you prioritise the migration of applications to the cloud, and what will be the factors that determine the priorities? Is the best way to give them a weighted score based on the needs of each application owner, or should time and cost be the driving factors? We’ll work with you to navigate the cleanest route to minimise down-time and stress for your whole team.

5. Tools: We'll look under the hood and tune your system until it’s humming

You’ll need tools. You may already have some cloud subscriptions, but how will you consolidate them? Are they in Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services? And how are you going to back up your applications if they reside in the cloud? We’ll assess your current suite of apps and tools, and work with you to decide whether to keep or upgrade them.