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Cloud Transition Services

Cloud Transition Services

Our Cloud Transition services are tailored to meet modern agile practices as well changing demands in rapidly evolving Cloud technologies. We acknowledge that all customers will have demands, but not necessarily adequate funding for a major programme of work or funding for acquiring full-time FTE and may not even know what kind of project they need to run and what type of services they would need in order to seek help from appropriate resources. Hence we structured our services to help startups, small, medium and large enterprises regardless of what stage they are in their project with certainty around funding and support from the senior leadership team.

Leadership

Leadership

We have successfully led cloud transition across several large scale to small scale initiatives from start to end across business, technical, operational, sales and marketing teams.

Leadership is not a title

We don't depend on people calling us as leaders as leadership is not a title, so we also don't send people just as leaders, but everyone delivering on behalf of us will have leadership qualities at the respective levels, which is critical to success of any large scale even medium scale Cloud transition programme.

The leadership qualities enable:

  • Empathy that drives better understanding
  • Providing clear direction
  • Creating focus towards clear business outcome
  • Empowering people and guidance
  • Articulating risks and mitigations at the right level to help land on a decision.
  • Providing peace of mind to the customer, we got this sorted for you!

Leadership is a bonus

As you won't see people with the title as a leader from us at the same time, we won't charge our customers to provide leadership as a service, that's on us! We make sure our people demonstrate leadership quality, work with them and coach so all our people demonstrate leadership as a softskill no matter what their actual role is.

Best thing in the life comes for free! Yes, we live by that principle for all of our customers and that's where we standout.

Architecture Roadmap and Design Assurance

Architecture Roadmap and Design Assurance

Building a Cloud/Data/Business Application Platform from ground up requires extensive knowledge and experience across business, technology, people and process and leadership skills.

It also requires extensive people and soft skills and business value and agile thinking to incrementally build the platform with several milestones and demonstrate business value in each milestones.

We have extensive experience in building platforms for a large utility company, financial institutions and government and each milestone was a project on it's own with clear business outcome delivered including winning new business offshore.

Platform Architecture and Design

Platform for each customer may have a different meaning and from customer point of view, all capabilities available in an enterprise platform should be designed with end to end service delivery in mind and should be integrated with the overall service management system and processes.

The overall platform architecture involves, but not limited to:

  • Network Architecture and Design
  • Identity and Access Management
  • Compute Standard Operating Environment (SOE)
  • CI/CD Tooling
  • Cloud Landing Zone Design

Cloud Landing Zone Design

Cloud Landing Zone has become very popular and initial introduction of reference implementation by AWS, which was called AWS Landing Zone solution for sure uplifted the popularity.

The Cloud Landing Zone though looks like an architecture pattern, the implementation in AWS and Azure and going forward from other Cloud providers as well, are quite different on how it's implemented, keeping basic capability of the landing zone quite close across all cloud providers.

Let's ask yourself some questions to clarify why you need such a landing zone in your organisation.

  1. How can I get access to a cloud tenant, account, subscription, project or whatever the smaller environment using my organisation's credentials and comply to all policies and standards of my organisation?
  2. How can I create a cloud resource such as a VM, storage instance and applications or my organisation's data in a secure manager to comply with my organisation's policy?
  3. How can I access my cloud resources from my devices to manage and access applications?
  4. How can I keep all my resources current across all my cloud environments?
  5. How can I monitor my applications for security and technical events and remediate as soon as possible?
  6. How can I handle DR scenarios, how do I schedule backups, how to restore them and how to handle site to site DR?
  7. How can I do all these across 100s of cloud environments?

These are some of the questions to be asked before you go into Cloud Landing Zone design phase.

Based on the answers you provide, the Cloud Portfolio starts from really simple to extremely complex, especially if you are going to have 100s of cloud environments, it's almost given that you need a Cloud Landing Zone type solution to consistently manage all of your cloud environments.

We have extensive experience in designing, building and managing Cloud Landing Zone at scale across multiple customers and across different cloud providers.

Design DR and Backup

The entire engineering discipline evolved based on thousands of disasters and cloud engineering is not exemption. If you have chosen to move your IT assets to cloud you are indirectly binding the principle that the weather or not a disaster would strike but it's a matter of when a disaster would strike?

Yes, in cloud we must architect our solutions to anticipate disaster anytime.

When it strikes:

  • how can we minimise the data loss (RPO) if not completely prevent it
  • how soon we can restore the services (RTO)

All these must be part of your service management BAU processes.

We have extensive experience in automating the entire DR process in and across Cloud, providing backup services using partner solutions and cloud native services and successfully transitioning the same to the service management.

We architect and design DR and backup strategies that aligns with your organisation's business and compliance requirements that includes but not limited to:

  • Backup and Restore
  • Pilot Light
  • Warm Standby
  • Active - Active

For more details refer disaster-recovery-options-in-the-cloud

Well Architected Services

Since it's first launch back in 2012, AWS Well-Architected Framework has become the defacto industry framework architecting cloud platforms and cloud workloads.

Acknowledging it's imminent need for any successful cloud adoption, Microsoft launched the same 8 years after it's competitor AWS, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-the-microsoft-azure-wellarchitected-framework/.

The framework was composed on five pillars and lately AWS introduced sustainability pillar as the sixth pillar, which provides several architecture principles, guidance and standards on what to do and especially what not to do.

The weight of Each of the pillar varies across the type of industry, location, size and maturity, therefore it's important to understand the business, technology and people/process landscape before applying the Well Architected Framework and performing review on the same.

We have extensive experience in adopting, applying and reviewing architecture and designing using Well Architected Framework across several customers and helped improve the security posture, value for money and operational excellence.

Security Assurance

Security Assurance

We provide services ranging from security risk identification, management and continuous assurance services to govt.nz , NZ Financial Institutions, large enterprises, small and medium businesses as well as startups.

NZ Government

We provide Security Assurance Services to meet

The services provided to government include

  • security procurement of new services and vendors
  • security architecture
  • customised security framework to comply with above standards, assessment and implementation.

Financial Institutions

Based on our experience, for a successful adoption of cloud in any financial institution, we should get security right from the start and throughout.

There will always be custom frameworks that are required to be designed and developed for most of the financial institutions, but our experience in the following frameworks helps us and the client to accelerate the services on the following frameworks:

It's also critical to service transition the security operations with continuous assurance enabled to the internal or contracted security operations team.

We take them through a journey right from the start so there are no surprises close to go-live. We don't believe in compromising security controls for a short term benefit of project milestones, but we look at business milestone as a whole with the right level of security risk to enable the business by meeting their expectations.

Enterprises

Unlike financial institutions other large enterprises does not have the similar requirements, but part of the security framework applicable for financial institutions can be applicable for other large enterprises as well.

Security for any entity

We recognise depends on where you are and the exposure of your business, the security risk posture will be different and the amount of effort on architecting, designing and implementing security controls needed to be customised based on the security risk posture of each entity.

We adopt and embrace the policy of security is everyone's business , so we take our customers on the security journey as they travel with us on the cloud journey in a sustainable manner.

Security Services Portfolio

The following the portfolio of security services that we provide, but should be a new need or require customisation, we are happy to discuss and incorporate it.

Security Governance Frameworks and Processes

The security services start with your cloud journey and continue beyond cloud journey so it's wider than cloud adoption itself. In recognition of full security continuous coverage we have been providing the following security services to our customer and take customer through out the cloud journey and beyond.

  • Create Cloud and wider Security architecture
  • Cloud security standards for customers
  • Zero trust security architecture
  • Standards based security architecture (PCI DSS, NZISM, ISO & NIST)
  • Adversary engagement, denial, disruption analysis
  • Create Cyber Security strategy for customers
  • Cybersecurity product evaluations
  • Building SOC/SIEM capabilities

Threat Modelling and Security Posture Assessment

We follow world's leading threat modelling frameworks, frameworks that are preferred by the customers and frameworks that are relevant for the industry.

We have a network of experienced security architects and consultants in Cloud and across wider large enterprises, who has worked across government, financial and utility domains in significantly large programme of work.

  • Threat modelling - main focus is Mitre Att&ck framework
  • Threat emulation "Purple teaming"
  • Organisation SOC assessments - MITRE Att&ck methodology

Security Automation (DevSecOps)

In the current complex and ever evolving technical landscape, managing security risks, threats and events just using manual processes become almost impossible. In otherwords, to have any effective security capability for your organisation, you should have sufficient level of automation across all aspects of security.

We have experience across multiple organisations and cloud providers on the following services:

  • Agile first embedded security modelling
  • CI/CD security best practices "DevSecOps"
  • Automated security release structures and assessments.
  • Infrastructure as code security assessments pipelines
  • Automated compliance and standards assessment
  • Automated risk management

Continuous Assurance

Assessing your organisation's security posture across your cloud environment is absolutely critical to manage your orgnisations risk and keep your stakeholders and customer happy.

We have experience across multiple customers and multiple tools including cloud native tools to provide automated continous assurance with custom built policies. This includes, but not limited to:

  • Creation of compliance
  • Security analysis and incident response
Business Applications

Business Applications

We have experience in build business applications that's mostly done using SaaS applications with no or less coding. We design, work with development and deployment partners, service transition to production and enable business outcomes.

CRM Applications

We have extensive experience in designing and delivering CRM solutions using https://www.salesforce.com/au to large enterprises.

We also have partnered with https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-nz/crm/ experts to provide Microsoft CRM solutions in Microsoft Cloud.

The enterprise, integration and platform experience enables us not only provide standalone CRM solutions, but also enable us to integrate the CRM to rest of your enterprise and provide streamlined services.

ERP Applications

We have partnered with https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-nz/erp/erp-software/ solution experts to provide our customers with the comprehensive ERP solution.

The combination of our extensive experience across enterprises, business, integration, technology stack and people/processes enable us to not only deliver ERP solutions, but also integrated seamless experience all via one service provider.

HRM Solutions

Our experience across large organisations and creating new organisations from ground up enables us to work with any HRM solutions providers.

We also have partnered with HRM solution experts to provide you with an accelerate business outcome and with our expertise, also providing streamlined service.

Document Management Solutions

We can provide cloud based on document management solutions that fits for your needs working with expert partners, who has extensive experience in providing the same to many customers.

We also can provide complete lifecycle management solution for documents that can be integrated with rest of your processes and applications.

Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence

We provide consultancy, review of operational processes and provide advice on:

  • Improving operational processes
  • Building a framework to reduce the operational deficiency
  • Creating matrices and operational dashboard design to continuously improve the operational efficiency.
  • Creating transformational path to move from traditional operations to site reliability culture.

We have organised our operational excellence services into following:

Cloud Transition Assessment

It's always a good idea to have another pair of eye on your cloud transition, to make sure:

  • you have made the right choice to move to cloud.
  • you understood the impact of moving to cloud
  • you have addressed the dependencies before start your cloud journey
  • you are moving in the right direction
  • you have clearly defined milestones and business outcomes
  • you know your destination and stopovers

Continuous independent Cloud Transition Assessment is highly recommended for any small and medium businesses as well as large enterprises. At the same time, at the right level, when startups applies the same, the speed of cloud adoption takes completely a different level.

Feel free to Contact Us to have a free no obligation consultation on this further.

Design and Refine Operating Model

Let be realistic, by moving to public Cloud, you are only moving your physical infrastructure to someone else's data centers, so only the physical infrastructure need not be be managed, but all other aspects remain with you as a customer, that includes:

  • All your platforms such as databases, middleware, data, reporting, security and events management and any other platforms that are relevant for your day to day operations.
  • The service management across all of your services, the cloud providers won't and can't manage your services, they provide primitive cloud services such as compute, disk, storage etc., but it's up to you to create a composite application including all of the cloud provider services and manage your final product as a service within your SLAs.
  • By moving to cloud you are extending your technology portfolio into cloud, unless you completely decommission everything on-premise and all your access are going to be only over internet. This means you will need people not only to understand and manage your on-premise infrastructure, but you also need people to understand and manage cloud and connectivity between cloud and on-premise.
  • As your technology portfolio is extended into cloud, which is someone else's data center you are also increasing your security risks, which needs to be managed with modern eye as you are now in someone else's premises potentially alone with your competitor's or a hacker's compute instance.

These are few considerations before you start defining/refining your operating model before moving into cloud. It's most critical step and should be done prior to moving into cloud not after the fact!

Please Contact Us should you like to have a free consultation with no obligations. The operating model is your engine and fuel to have a smooth cloud journey and you must get it right to make it enjoyable!