There are any number of reasons why an organization may go through cloud transformation. If you are considering or even started this journey, have you asked yourself ‘What does cloud transformation mean to me and why am I doing it?’ Your answer could be that your company is trying to save CapEx in favor of OpEx, reduce data center costs, or were driven there from the more chaotic start of a grassroots effort growing organically through your organization that must now be managed.
Asking yourself this question and understanding your business drivers are the first steps in creating an overarching cloud strategy that is critical to the success of any transformation.
The goal of our cloud practice is to help you define that overarching strategy across three key areas – application migration, path to production (continuous integration/continuous deployment or CICD), and cloud architecture.
These three key areas build out your cloud journey to look like:
- Assess how and should your applications migrate to the cloud
- The process for deploying your applications into production in the cloud
- Optimization, performance, and management of your cloud running those applications
Application Migration
In this part of the cloud journey, there several different migration options based on the type of application to be moved in the context of your company’s goals and business drivers.
Our migration assessment team helps clients understand which options are best for them including application migration strategies, appropriate architecture patterns for refactoring/rearchitecting in-house applications to be cloud-native, as well as support migration of virtual environments from on-prem to cloud-based infrastructure.
For example, here is a high-level view of the different migration strategies:
CICD/Path to Production
When understanding any process, it is important to have situational awareness of that process. Imagine a chess match without a board in front of you, with no situational awareness of the current state of the match, it is incredibly difficult to determine a future state.
Our team works closely with our clients’ operations, development, security, and IT teams to assess existing CI/CD processes. Together, we create current state and future state visualizations of the processes used to move software from the development environment into production. Based on those visualizations, a clear path from the current state to the idealized future state will emerge.
Cloud Architecture
Security, oversight, and utilization of your cloud infrastructure are critical to running your assets in the cloud economically. Our architecture team helps assess and recommend optimizations, as well as tools and strategies for a more secure and compliant cloud architecture.
Throughout every step of the cloud journey, Aqueduct has tailored solutions and assessments to help you understand where you, next steps to take, and actions to further drive business outcomes. Explore our assessments here.