Time to get your head in the cloud!

Source- devopsonline.co.uk

As part of a specialist DevOps and cloud consultancy that helps organisations to use public cloud securely and professionally throughout their cloud journey, I’ve seen the importance of working closely with companies to define their public cloud strategy and governance model, build secure core-infrastructure, enable DevOps teams and migrate data centres.

With this in mind, the crucial mission at hand is to help organisations accelerate their time-to-value from the cloud, by designing, building, and optimising their infrastructures in the public cloud.

As part of a team of DevOps fanatics, a core part of my work is to help organisations leverage the cloud to increase the speed and success of digital transformation.

Whether an organisation is already using the cloud or planning to use the cloud in the future, the most important reason behind any cloud products is to help new, or existing, enterprises create the foundations for business innovation on which they can then build.

Cloud and DevOps are certainly a growing area and companies are increasingly realising the need to release more faster and safely turn to the cloud because of its agility to help them do that.

Although embracing the cloud is the first step, it’s important to also know how to utilise its speed to ensure that you gain all the advantages it comes with – hence the need for companies to also adopt DevOps as well.

DevOps eliminates a lot of manual tasks that developers continuously undertake and helps give a boost to the development teams. It enables them to interact with harmony and reduces the blame game of ‘it was working on my machine’.

Just like any other major tech game-changers like IoT, machine learning, blockchain, and big data, DevOps is also considered a game disruptor.

DevOps enables teams to evolve and learn collaboratively, ensuring they deploy often and automatically, with rapid release cycles making things faster, which in turn gives the company a competitive edge in the market.

Integrating different teams is at the heart of DevOps and is the first hurdle and currently the biggest challenge. The move to DevOps can also seem scary to the majority of team members and key stakeholders, but I strongly believe the discomfort of change is better than staying behind the competition and not being innovative.

Most companies aren’t big enough or doing things complicated enough, to justify having a specialised, in-house team of DevOps engineers. They do it because everyone is doing it or believe that is what is going to set them apart, and that is often a costly mistake.

I’ve learned over the years that no DevOps or cloud adoption story is the same and each project must be approached based on its individual requirements, timescale and budget, through a lens of expertise and experience gathered over these years.

It is important to help clients move to the cloud in a way that satisfies their information security, compliance, auditing and regulatory requirements. Based on that, I believe that creating a lightweight adoption and assessment framework to help deliver successful digital transformation faster and more accurately to clients is key.

Cloud Foundation

This is a core element and provides an automated cloud infrastructure and migration service, based on AltoStack’s own and industry-best practices. This provides a secure, automated ‘cloud landing zone’ which forms the foundation for a customer’s cloud platform.

After choosing a public cloud, a team can then help them implement the technology as well as set up the related processes.

One question I often hear from organisations is: ‘how do you approach the transformation and deal with all the moving parts involved?’ Well, enabling cloud in your company can be a difficult task and AltoStack’s cloud enablement team can help a company answer the crucial questions, using cloud workshops and consulting, culminating in a clear, step-by-step roadmap for their organisation.

Cloud Migration

It’s every organisation’s priority for any transition to not disrupt day-to-day operations and to ensure the continuity of business during a migration process, therefore, it is extremely important to help companies reduce the costs and risks of migration.

AltoStack achieve this with proven processes, specialised tools and many years of migration experience. Cloud migration is usually an eight-step process that has core dependencies around good governance and core infrastructure solutions, which lay the foundations required to progress a large-scale migration.

Managed CloudOps

With a company’s critical production systems running on the cloud, it is vital to provide specifically tailored operations, monitoring and support. AltoStack manages these operations in their entirety so that enterprises have more time to add value to their business operations.

Managed DevOps

It is vital to work in partnership with a business to enable, build and ratify any DevOps transformation strategy and ensure that it is aligned to their business’s objectives and priorities.

By focusing on the essential elements of a successful DevOps transformation, AltoStack develops a strategic business plan around DevOps practices and approaches to accelerate technology delivery at scale. Automation of orchestration, provisioning and management of cloud environments – to accelerate time-to-value and increase efficiencies – are all core to this delivery.

A consolidated group of experts

Comprised of a group of experts that have spent thousands of hours building and supporting complex cloud infrastructure and having taken all the knowledge and experience gained from migrating organisations to the cloud – and helping organisations successfully adopt DevOps at scale – AltoStack have distilled their offering into proven frameworks that are tailored according to each client’s needs.

Increasing numbers of companies are now realising they do not need an in-house operations team to support infrastructure that isn’t theirs, and that what they need is a reliable partner to handle all their operational and infrastructure needs – so their developers can focus on building great products they can be proud of!

As well as saving companies, on average, over £100,000 per partnership, we at AltoStack believe that quite simply it boils down to this – stop wasting resources building an in-house team to manage something you don’t own – your infrastructure is not yours!

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure own it. What you own is your product, so why not focus on that and let the experts take care of everything else?