The solution to the complexity of multicloud: the Professional Services consultant

In the midst of the digital transformation in which we are immersed, organizations are challenged by the increasing speed of change. The current situation has forced companies to accelerate their digital processes and improve their infrastructures to face this new reality, the Cloud being the main driver of this new paradigm.

Today's companies face multiple challenges: improve their internal processes, grow their business, build trusting relationships, innovate to remain relevant... We are in an increasingly competitive and changing market, with complex regulations, new evolving business models and where the need to be agile and reliable is not an option, but an obligation.

Companies have to take advantage of the latest technologies to differentiate themselves from the competition and stay afloat. One of these technologies is the Cloud. But to discover all the advantages of the Cloud and establish what the perfect solution for your business is, there are certified professionals specialized in this field, which aim to help organizations to define, design and deliver the most suitable strategy to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

The Cloud enables organizations to respond faster to market changes. It frees up and optimizes underutilized resources and reduces the impact of infrastructure upgrade cycles, among many other advantages, to take businesses a step forward in their digital transformation.

When companies opt for Cloud solutions, they reduce their operating costs by an average of 16%, achieve an average 21% improvement in time to market, record an average 30% reduction in overall IT costs and 94% of companies see security improvements. *

But there are still companies that are reluctant to change, citing arguments such as:

• Service interruptions and downtime
• Lack of governance in the Cloud
• Inadequate security controls
• Lack of a secure and reliable cloud platform
• Risk of regulatory non-compliance and cyber-attacks
• Malpractice of shared responsibility model
• Inadequate design for application deployment...

Therefore, these organizations should consult cloud services professionals to help them select which applications are eligible for migration, understand the cost across different cloud platforms, define the appropriate architecture and execute the migration.

The cloud professional services consultant will first conduct a thorough assessment of the organization's IT infrastructure to design the ideal cloud migration roadmap for the company, as well as assess which applications are adaptable to the cloud, including the business case.

After this first phase of assessment and analysis, and to understand how ready the company is for Cloud adoption, the professional services consultant will verify the assessment report, while gathering additional design-specific information. After this step, comes the design and implementation of the cloud architecture according to the requirements.

The last phase will be migration. Once the information is validated, the migration plan is created and then executed to bring the applications and data to the Cloud.

The key functions of a consultant during the design and deployment of Cloud solutions can be summarized as:

• Combine the right technology without relying on a single cloud service provider.
• Increase the speed of the design and deployment cycle through an agile way of working.
• Eliminate integration inefficiencies between cloud and on-premise systems through proven frameworks.
• Clearly define a set of modules that are right-sized for each organization.
• Align infrastructure with business performance.

In addition, for the migration process, the work of the Cloud professional services consultant will be:

• Reduce turnaround time, thanks to a factory-based approach that ensures that the various migration activities are executed efficiently.
• Ensure right-first-time delivery, thanks to proven native Cloud tools and proprietary assets, blueprints, and templates.
• Minimize application migration costs by supporting the process with an innovative delivery model and automated tool-based approach.
• Ensure best practices are applied to the new environment by leveraging specialized knowledge from subject matter experts.

In conclusion, professional services consultants are helping organizations of any business activity or number of employees to design, implement and take advantage of cloud opportunities and get the most out of cloud technology.