While there are many ways an organisation can go about cloud adoption, cloud consulting is becoming an increasingly prominent approach. This is unsurprising, considering a 2022 PluralSight survey indicated that 64% of respondents were new to cloud computing and needed basic training.
However, with so many businesses in the cloud space providing one or more of an assortment of cloud-related services, figuring out how they fit into your organisation's cloud aspirations can be challenging. Remember, cloud computing can ensure business continuity, improve accessibility, and dramatically reduce service provision costs, among other benefits, which is why this article is all about helping you:
Understanding Cloud Consultancy
Cloud consultancy is the guidance given to an organisation on how to set up, utilise, and maintain a cloud environment effectively. Organisations harnessing cloud consulting services are maximising cloud benefits such as:
Cost reduction – Utilising cloud consultants can reduce the amount otherwise spent on establishing expertise within your workforce, whether through training existing staff or recruiting experts. Theoretically, this would also lead to cost reductions related to mistakes possibly made by in-house cloud novices whilst learning to adopt cloud solutions.
Scalability – A typical cloud service provider may be more focused on maximising sales through subscriptions to their offerings, they could leave the client-facing issues like minimal integration capabilities and vendor lock-in, slow response and repair time, and functionality constraints like limited support for serverless functions and other automation-driven techniques.
This complicates activities like provisioning during vital missions such as rapidly onboarding new market segments. However, cloud infrastructure consulting zooms out to emphasise the broader cloud adoption strategy, hence being more open to blending various cloud technologies for the perfect mix of solutions that can be easily expanded. More importantly, you can quickly get more help when needed rather than paying for many features you don't need from the get-go.
Security – Cloud consultants are more likely to consider public, private, and hybrid cloud approaches, to end up with a strategy that strikes the best balance from a security standpoint. They have the foresight that in-house staff may lack regarding choices such as which infrastructure should underpin less sensitive organisation assets vs. the mission-critical processes.
Cloud consulting teams also often have more knowledge of best practices for handling workload migrations, permissions, and protecting secrets and the best cloud solutions for realising these practices.
Expert guidance – When working with cloud consultants, you can tap into a larger knowledge bank on crucial aspects of cloud migration. Consultants work with different clients, transferring past lessons and wins to your project, helping you benefit from perspectives and tips you otherwise wouldn't have accessed.
Cloud Consultancy Success Stories
In one case, StubHub, a marketplace for sports and entertainment event tickets, wanted to make all relevant ticket information available to every consumer in one place with greater stability throughout the day. They worked with a cloud consultancy team that oversaw development, testing, staging, and production for various database elements running in the cloud.
After using different database technologies, they improved server infrastructure stability, and the company subsequently increased its market share of ticket sales to roughly half of the overall US ticket sales for their target events. (ref Marketing Staffing Agency - Akraya).
In another case, an Australian EdTech company contacted a cloud consulting team to help them offer their digital learning solutions to a broader area. The team oversaw an upgrade from the existing MVC architecture.
Eventually, the digital e-learning platform became 30% faster and easier to modernise for all four user profiles (teacher, child, parent, and administrator). The company also achieved a 50% reduction in costs compared to traditional learning methods, doubled new student registrations, and introduced gamified learning, resulting in a 40% improvement in learning outcomes. (ref Cloud Consulting Services: What is, Benefits and Success Stories (rishabhsoft.com)
Assessing Your Organization’s Cloud Needs
Before committing to a particular cloud solution, it is important to ascertain your organisation's cloud needs for several reasons:
- Firstly, this practice reduces the chances of wasting resources on nice-to-have features that are ultimately unnecessary. It also helps you differentiate between foundational provisions and adjustable ones. For instance, you’ll get closer to understanding how much processing power and storage you’ll need in the beginning vs. how much more of each you’ll have to provision as customer activity ramps up.
- Secondly, you can know how much you'll do things by yourself and the areas in which you'll seek external help. This readiness assessment helps you easily manage the human resources aspect of transitioning into the cloud, such as when and how to involve outsiders and communicate during the process.
- Thirdly, knowing your needs helps you harmonise your adoption for steady progress while staying focused on crucial service provision elements that impact customer satisfaction.
- Lastly, your organisation will also ensure that the cloud setup can easily evolve in different directions if certain technologies are deprecated, user demands change, or newer cutting-edge solutions from other providers emerge. With proper change management strategies, you can switch, integrate, and continue working smoothly amidst any implications, such as the need for reskilling or additional training.
The Cloud Consultancy Process
Typically, cloud consulting can be divided into a three-phase process, which includes:
Adoption/Migration:
This is the stage at which the organisation and the consultants identify the existing cloud elements or equivalent IT infrastructure and assets. It is also the point at which they pinpoint what needs complementing and what needs to be replaced. During this phase, the team will also outline suitable alternatives and plan on how to shift to these options.
The adoption phase is often a blend of non-technical and technical actions, like brainstorming administrative policies, assigning responsibilities, and diagnosing existing hardware and software. Here, the organisation and the consultants agree on which technologies to use and start preliminary processes like setting up accounts with the chosen providers, procuring equipment, and acquiring space in cases like private data centre setups. In some cases, the technical aspect may simply be a lift-and-shift approach, where current systems are migrated with little change and integrating them, as they are, into some basic cloud services, like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
Transformation/Re-architecture:
In this phase, the technical personnel unite and deepen their collaborative efforts on different activities. These may include building and testing new application elements, orchestrating workflows, relocating assets, restructuring their relationships, and more. This is usually the stage where an application or system is redesigned to use more advanced cloud services, like a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offering. Often this will involve breaking the app into functional components and sometimes into a design known as microservices.
Ultimately, re-architecture aims to maintain functionality while improving performance, cost-effectiveness, scalability, security, and reliability.
Support and Maintenance:
This phase comes after installations and transfers have been made. It’s the part where the cloud setup is revisited regularly to ensure changes to the cloud service, market conditions or security landscape are adapted to in good time. It can also institute client requests like changing permissions and other controls, assess performance, monitoring performance and security signals - and general site reliability engineering.
Support and maintenance often involve both routine and sporadic actions. You can't always know when you'll need an extra pair of hands to help solve an issue. This is why it also entails some continuous planning and adjustments to ensure that there are always enough on-call personnel with comprehensive know-how to respond to different eventualities.
Selecting the Right Cloud Consultancy Partner
When choosing a cloud consultancy partner, there are different factors to consider, and these include:
Expertise:
A cloud consultancy partner can help with a wide range of services, such as migrating workloads, setting up backup and recovery systems, automating cloud operations, securing cloud assets, and detecting and rectifying issues with cloud technologies, among other actions.
Therefore, it's vital to pick a cloud consultancy partner with vast knowledge of cloud migration, re-architecture, and maintenance. This will help you avoid switching between partners for different services. It also reduces the likelihood of having incoherent solutions since a well-rounded service team will use a more holistic approach to addressing your cloud needs.
Reputation:
Before committing to a cloud consulting partner, endeavour to find out who they've worked with before and what those organisations have to say about their services. For example, some cloud consultancy partners may be known to move slowly and make several revisits before finalising basic installations, configurations, and transfers.
Others might be good at their work but are biassed towards/against specific cloud technologies. They may choose what they find easier to set up, not what would work best for you. Additionally, some may focus more on boosting sales/subscriptions for a particular brand's product/service.
Compatibility:
This is crucial, especially when trying to have a smooth working relationship. Some cloud consulting agencies might be larger and more bureaucratic, which can slow down the migration process. While they might have more staff for support and maintenance, they may frequently rotate them, leaving you with someone new who hasn't followed your cloud migration journey.
Compatibility also extends to things like your budget, the proximity of assistants to your organisation’s physical location for on-the-ground exercises, compliance procedures, and more. Ultimately, you want to work with a team that can quickly understand why their approach to a different client's work may not match your project and promptly adjust accordingly.
Questions you can ask potential cloud consultancy partners
- Which cloud technologies are you most conversant with?
- Who have you worked with before?
- Which client/project do you feel brought out the best in you and why?
- How do you approach cloud-related compliance issues?
- Do you have standard payment plans, or can you tailor one to a specific client?
- How would you approach a scenario where a recommended and instituted solution fails?
- Will you have a specific team member dedicated to servicing our account?
Overcoming Common Challenges
During cloud migration, some common challenges encountered include:
Data Security – Often, organisations may want the performance and affordability associated with prominent public cloud solutions but may be sceptical about having sensitive trade information hosted by these providers. This is usually intensified by news about API key theft and attacks that spread from one user to another or take down an entire block of servers used by different clients.
Resistance to change – When an organisation's staff are used to doing things a certain way, getting them to adopt new technologies can be tricky. For some, it's all about the software's complexities, while others are concerned about increased scrutiny of their work or new approval procedures.
Budget constraints – While some large organisations might have sizeable funds for cloud migrations and other modernization efforts, smaller organisations may have to earn as they pay. This leaves them without the total amount needed for the next longer/more elaborate phase of migration or even the emergency funds for addressing client-induced failures.
Navigating Cloud Challenges
Regarding data security, cloud consulting teams can suggest hybrid setups where clients maintain complete control over the more sensitive data using private cloud solutions. Client organisations and consultants can also collaborate to incorporate cloud service providers' best security solutions and get developers to write additional software rules that close common attack vectors.
To reduce resistance to change, organisations can outsource experts who'll help train their staff to use the new technologies. Furthermore, the organisation can appoint a dedicated cloud champion who routinely reminds staff how cloud technologies simplify work.
They can highlight how automation saves workers some time and how they can access files and applications from anywhere and easily collaborate and track progress. For example, here’s a quick look into how Mesoform has used automation to help a client with compliance enforcement.
If experiencing budget constraints, an organisation can work with cloud consultants to explore pay-per-use options, have initial trials of different service packages before committing to long-term subscriptions, and prioritise migrating workloads that urgently need performance boosts and other complementary functionality. Later, they can gradually bring more elements into the cloud once they’ve gotten more funds for a broader migration.
The Future of Cloud Consultancy
As organisations' cloud needs continue to evolve, this means cloud consultants have to continually improve and execute different approaches, such as:
Multi-cloud strategies – These involve using technologies from different cloud service providers while minimising the management implications often associated with multiple accounts.
Hybrid cloud – As mentioned earlier, more organisations want to balance agility and privacy. They want to work faster and smarter while keeping their valuables safe from cyber attacks, so cloud consultants must improve at combining private and public cloud solutions and making them interact seamlessly.
PaaS – While many cloud service providers are getting better at handling more tasks delegated by their clients, some clients still want bespoke solutions to help them internally manage certain aspects of their cloud setups. This is where Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions come in.
Cloud consultants will have to excel at working with clients to develop unique self-help tools that the clients can use to keep cloud-based operations smooth without having to code a lot or be very tech-savvy in general.
Cloud consultants should also consistently look into how they can push the boundaries of automation, utilise containerisation, strengthen security, and make it easier to scale cloud operations up or down on demand.
Benefits of staying ahead
By keeping tabs on emerging cloud trends, cloud consultants will be able to:
- Reduce client costs over time through automation, pay-per-use, and other methods, thereby enhancing cloud efficacy.
- Differentiate themselves and acquire more clients by providing each one with consultancy services tailored to their unique needs.
- Reduce the compliance risk associated with poorly orchestrated cloud operations that may breach applicable data laws.
- Increase enthusiasm for cloud solutions as more client organisations’ staff realise how these technologies simplify their work and improve their lives.
Wrapping Up
Cloud consulting is a viable path for organisations of various sizes looking to adopt cloud technologies, irrespective of their capacity in this field. Cloud advisory services help fill knowledge gaps, limit blunders, promote standardisation, and simplify cloud-based service delivery.
Remember, establishing clear objectives and openly communicating with a cloud consultancy partner will massively help in cloud strategy optimization. So, if you're looking for a suitable partner to assist in streamlining cloud adoption, Mesoform is ready to provide both essential cloud technology guidance and higher-level cloud transformation solutions.
