At Arxus, we invest heavily in the new approach of Managed Cloud Services, which we call Cloud Custodian Services. In the blog post “Managed Cloud Services: what does the future look like?" you can read more about that. Our Cloud Custodian Services are divided into three major steps: plan, ready and operate. In this blog post, we will look in more detail at the first step: the plan phase.
The plan phase consists of two important parts: on the one hand, we will update the customer's knowledge of Azure and cloud through a number of workshops, and on the other hand, we plan a number of assessments to gain a clear view of the current IT environment.
In this way, the scope of the project, the possibilities and the risks can be mapped.
Based on the workshops and assessments, we make our recommendations and draw up a clear roadmap for a migration to the public cloud.
Arxus has a number of workshops that customers can choose from in the plan phase. These interactive workshops are always led by a cloud architect from Arxus and are intended to teach the most important subjects, but also to discuss relevant topics together when starting a migration to the cloud. Participants are therefore actively involved during the workshops and the workshops deal with the concrete business case of the customer.
This workshop is a must for organizations that have no conceptual knowledge of the Azure portfolio. We discuss the main capabilities of Azure and show the main components within the Azure architecture.
This is the most important workshop within the entire plan phase. If there is one workshop that is absolutely necessary in the preparation, it is this one. This two-day workshop, for which we invite all key figures in the migration, serves as input for the scope of the cloud roadmap and defines the set of rules and organizational structure of the cloud environment in Azure. The workshop focuses on topics such as configuration and management levels within Azure, role-based access and identity protection, policy and compliance, management and automation, cost management, ... Based on this workshop, we also create a first high-level design that can then be discussed in further meetings.
This workshop typically follows the Azure Governance workshop when it becomes apparent that there is a need for a high available architecture to run business-critical workloads.
This optional workshop can be scheduled when it becomes clear that there is a need for enhanced security, on top of Azure native security solutions and best practices.
Assessments have a specific scope and are intended to collect information and make recommendations about a specific infrastructure, workload or application.
During this assessment, we analyze the infrastructure and look at possible optimisations for a migration to the cloud. As a customer you will receive an end-to-end analysis and mapping of your current IT environment and the opportunities that lie in the cloud.
This analysis forms the basis for the evaluation of the overall infrastructure in relation to the on-premise and cloud strategy. It shows where you can optimize current application and server workloads while also providing insight into the business and technological benefits of moving workloads to the cloud.
The Cloud Enablement Assessment is designed to provide the customer with information needed to assess whether he is ready for a cloud migration.
During an application assessment, together with the technical and business owners, we will assess the maturity of important application or workloads when it comes to Cloud Native Architecture and DevOps.
We usually perform this optional assessment in operational Azure environments or environments close to a Go-Live. We evaluate the Azure set-up from a security perspective and identify (potential) risks and gaps. Afterwards, you will receive concrete advice and a roadmap to close those gaps.
These various workshops and assessments form the basis for the plan phase and are the stepping stones to the ready phase. We will tell you more about this phase in another blog post.
This blog post is the second in a series of blog posts on Cloud Custodian Services. You can also read:
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