It’s no secret that cloud skills are at a premium. People with proven expertise in large, complex, or business-critical cloud migrations are hard to come by. This can be a limiting factor in cloud transformation, especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services where risk management is paramount.
Focus on Cloud Development and Management Skills for In-house Teams
Staff training is one part of the solution. And it is important that your people develop skills in this area. But it’s a learning curve which takes time, and when employees’ capacity is already stretched, it takes them away from other core day-to-day tasks. Moreover, many enterprises prefer upgrading employees’ cloud skills in areas that will be relevant for the long term such as cloud computing methodologies and tools, rather than priming them for one-off migration events.
For the migration itself, partnering with a cloud consultancy is often best for a seamless transition that lays strong cloud foundations.
A Quicker, Safer Route to Cloud
1. Vertical Expertise
Cloud consultants often come equipped with deep sector-specific knowledge and insights gained from earlier projects. This is invaluable for organisations in highly regulated industries such as financial services where requirements can be complex and go beyond standard best practice. When selecting a cloud consulting partner, find out if they’ve worked for organisations like yours; ask about any industry-specific challenges they’ve encountered and how they were overcome.
2. Advisory Capabilities
As well as handling practical aspects of moving to the cloud, a specialist consultancy should act as a trusted advisor. This means working collaboratively to build a strategy based on your existing set-up and cloud goals. They will be able to devise a clear and compelling roadmap as well as recommending partners, tooling, and relevant services to further your cloud ambition.
3. Better Cost Management
Cost reduction is almost always a major driver of cloud migration. Unfortunately, hosting in the cloud often ends up costing more if businesses fail to take advantage of cloud methodologies and capabilities like elasticity. The ability to scale resources up and down as required is central to good cost management. Achieving this – and ideally automating it – requires cloud engineering expertise. Specialist agencies with proven track records have done it countless times before, and can put measures in place to ensure your costs are optimised from day one in the cloud.
4. Stronger Security
Cloud providers take a shared responsibility approach to security. So, they are responsible for security ‘of’ the cloud and customers are responsible for security ‘in’ the cloud. It’s important to understand this and take proactive measures to secure data stored in the cloud. Luckily these capabilities don’t need to be built from scratch. Cloud vendors and third-party providers have a wide range of powerful cloud-native tools and services which address even the most stringent data security and governance requirements. The sheer volume of options can be daunting, but expert cloud engineers keep up-to-date with the latest features and releases. They can make expert recommendations on the best tools or mix of tools for your specific security needs.
5. More Capacity for Innovation
Faster time to market is one of the main attractions of cloud-based software development. The ability to spin up and retire new resources in seconds gives developers the freedom to accelerate the development and testing of new ideas. Your cloud partner can support this with the introduction of guardrails and self-service platforms to ensure developers have freedom and autonomy to innovate without putting the organisation at risk. What’s more, the automation of key processes releases more time and capacity for innovation-led activities that drive business value.
A Good Cloud Partner Unlocks Value Faster
Here at Sourced Group (Sourced) an Amdocs company, complex, mission-critical migrations for enterprise organisations are business as usual. We act as a trusted advisor, collaborating with customers to gain a deep understanding of applications’ existing set-up and the desired outcomes. Then we make expert recommendations on the best way forward for each individual application. Once the route to cloud has been determined, we accelerate the process and ensure a positive start using techniques such as infrastructure and configuration as code.
Our team’s knowledge and experience of cloud platforms, solutions, and best practices helps customers achieve specific cloud goals. We handle technical aspects of cloud migration and associated areas such as platform engineering, landing zones, security and so on. And we also mentor customer teams to facilitate knowledge transfer. This sets them up for a successful cloud journey which avoids pitfalls and realises benefits faster.
Sourced has helped some of the world’s biggest and most security-conscious organisations achieve seamless, secure, and successful cloud migrations. We’ve also worked with scaling digital businesses across sectors including banking and insurance, helping them achieve more via cloud. AWS Premier Partner and Microsoft Solution Partner status underline our proven expertise. But it’s our customer stories that really shine a light on the business value of partnering with Sourced.
Contact us here if you’d like to talk about your next cloud migration project.
As a Managing Principal Consultant at Sourced Group, Bob leads engineering teams in the orchestration and delivery of cloud migrations and transformations. He specialises in the Azure platform, and has deep technical knowledge of cloud-native technologies and processes.
