The Cloud Custodian team at Arxus helps customers set up and prepare their environment for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft's public cloud. They are one of the Microsoft Expert Managed Service Providers for Azure in Belgium. Pieter Buytaert and York Van den Heuvel of the Cloud Custodian Team explain below how they can help your company with your transition to the cloud.

The shift to Microsoft Azure has been accelerating for about a decade. Whether you are an SME, department store or multinational, a transition to Azure is always possible.

Depending on your internal knowledge, we work together with your internal IT team, or we take full responsibility for setting up your cloud environment. The approach remains the same and there is consultation between Arxus and the client at every step of the process.

For your transition to the cloud, we rely on our experience and expertise based on Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework. We distinguish ourselves through our extensive experience and step-by-step guidance in discussing all the concepts used, deciding on the necessary decisions and thus creating a custom set-up for your company. Depending on the size of your organization, such a setup varies from a best practice implementation of a few days to an extensive set-up based on a longer collaboration.

We see three major stages in your company's transition to the cloud: Plan, Ready, Operate. Below we go over the different stages.

Plan

In the planning phase, we first determine the strategy. We make an overview of your business, what your needs are, and determine what you want to achieve with public cloud. In consultation with your internal IT team, we decide how you want to organize your cloud. If desired, we also provide training and workshops. The governance or compliance rules are best established at this early stage. By not postponing this until later, you avoid having to deal with certain matters again. A good preparation now ensures that all your business applications can be implemented correctly later on.

Ready

Once the plan is ready, we move on to building the platform. This step is fully defined to suit your business during the Plan phase. At Arxus, we choose to work with Terraform or Bicep Infrastructure as Code templates, which describe all configurations. These are stored in Azure DevOps or GitHub Repositories, and deployed automatically using CI/CD pipelines. The advantage of this is that everything is automatic and standardized. Every time someone modifies something in the code, this configuration is automatically and controlled deployed.

This set-up exclusively uses the native Microsoft Azure tools offered and their best practice configurations. Think compliance using Azure Policy and Microsoft Defender for cloud, backup configurations, update management, identity and access methods and so much more. In this phase you will configure and deploy all the options you set up during your planning phase.

Operate

The last step in our framework is also fully customized for your business. From the Operations part, everything is prepared and your cloud is ready to receive applications. We are now in an operational model. The ultimate goal now is to go from a classic central IT to a Cloud Center of Excellence that manages your cloud. In this phase, you can choose to develop this in-house, supplement it with Arxus expertise, or even have it completely monitored by us in a fully-fledged managed service model.

From the moment you are here, you are well prepared and can make your business innovate, accelerate and excel. Think of it as building a new city. The zoning is set, foundations, electricity and water lines are in place. Now you can start building houses or even apartment buildings at a rapid pace. This is the time when you can start integrating your workloads such as certain proprietary applications into your cloud.

Now that it is clear what we can do for you, you are probably curious about the next steps for your business. After the initial discussions we will give you a transparent insight into the work that needs to be done, depending on the maturity you have already built up.

Interested in moving to Azure? Contact us here.