Maximize what your cloud can do with support from the right consultant

The cloud is helping businesses reinvent how they develop and deliver their products and services, but managing it to achieve your business goals is a formidable task. The good news is there are experts in the public cloud who can help you harness cloud technology to work more efficiently, boosting productivity and accelerating innovation to catapult your business ahead of the competition. But first, what makes the cloud so difficult to navigate alone?

Challenges of the cloud

Cloud and multicloud environments are complex and dynamic. It takes skill and expertise to assess the suitability of a particular environment for deploying a service. Navigating multicloud is especially challenging: Now the dominant pattern of cloud adoption, multicloud involves integrating and operating multiple solutions and services from a single place. You also need to implement strong governance policies, robust security measures and strategies to manage multiple billing models from different cloud providers. 

To keep pace with changing functionality from multiple providers and leverage innovative cloud services, your team must be knowledgeable about tools, technologies and processes that differ depending on the cloud service. That calls for expertise in the latest cloud services from different providers, as well as a reliable system for managing the associated costs, which can quickly spiral out of control.

Easy access to expertise 

Acquiring the knowledge needed to manage a cloud or multicloud environment is no easy feat. You could try hiring to resolve the issue, but competition for the necessary qualifications is fierce, and the costs of recruiting in-demand staff are high. Training development teams also takes substantial time and resources. When you add in the time required to run multiple clouds and the need to properly understand the risks involved, managing a cloud environment on your own is extremely difficult. Often it's not a practical option, and such a strategy needs to be assessed carefully in advance.

Engaging with a cloud partner gives you access to expert engineers, who are available to answer questions, suggest best practices for cloud deployment and help solve any issues quickly and efficiently. The right partner has a proven track record and the experience to resolve your toughest challenges and collaborate with you to unlock your next level of business growth. 

For ISV companies primed for growth, a cloud partner can deliver the engineering expertise and resources to enable Marketplace sales channels for AWS and Google Cloud. With programs for co-sell enablement and market acceleration, companies can unlock their full potential for growth.

Cloud cost optimization

A key element of the cloud’s appeal is the promise of reduced costs. True, the ability to pay for only the resources you use sounds compelling, but the reality of the cloud is that, without proper visibility and attribution, costs can rise alarmingly and with no clear gains in performance. Organizations at various stages of cloud maturity often struggle to manage cloud spend, minimize waste and see real returns. 

An expert partner can help you optimize costs as you develop with the cloud. DoiT has automated cloud cost management with Flexsave, a product that takes care of cost analysis and optimization without manual intervention. It continuously monitors workloads and assigns reserved compute resources from DoiT's wholesale inventory to optimally cover any that are not covered by compute commitments such as Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances or Google Committed User Discounts.

Apart from supplying products that specifically target cloud cost optimization, your cloud partner can also help you improve visibility into costs across different providers and solutions, so you don’t have to spend hours sifting through invoices and billing consoles to see where spend is happening. These experts can help you track spending and attribute costs for increasingly complex cloud infrastructures. By identifying trends in your teams' work, you instill a sense of budget awareness into the way they work, so that budget becomes as integral to the lifecycle as delivery.

DoiT's business model offers customers unlimited consulting at zero cost. You get immediate access to world-class engineers and technology at no additional expense.

Peace of mind

The opportunities the cloud offers must be balanced against its inherent risks. Driven by a digital imperative accelerated by the global pandemic, many companies have failed to focus sufficiently on security dependencies before deploying to the cloud, often leaving teams scrambling to resolve the serious issues that can result. Formulating a robust cloud strategy requires a properly researched approach to risk management that identifies what can be done to mitigate the risks involved. A trusted partner can conduct a cloud security review and steer you on a safer cloud journey.

A proliferation of cloud technologies and changing regulations also makes compliance tricky. Cloud consultants versed in regulations including GDPR and certified in standards such as ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 and SOC 3 can help you maintain industry standards and regulations in different countries and regions. 

Your cloud consultant will quickly identify gaps in your security and compliance and help you define a risk-aligned architecture and security roadmap, prioritizing automation to mitigate risk and comply with regulatory requirements.

Potential to leverage new business opportunities

In an increasingly crowded marketplace defined by rapid shifts in customer needs and proliferating channels, few companies are achieving sustained, data-driven growth. Generating value from data insights that drive innovation and better decision-making is not easy, but leveraging the right data to understand and serve customers better creates new opportunities and competitive advantage. 

The cloud is the only place that enables this kind of data-driven innovation. Cloud-based architectures and platforms allow various kinds of data to be ingested, processed and analyzed  to generate insights to inform the kinds of products and services that customers want. Your cloud partner has the expertise to make this possible. Machine learning and big data experts can leverage frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch and other machine learning (ML) frameworks to solve complex business challenges, operationalizing ML-driven software to realize value in various industries. 

Next steps

By providing ready access to a level of targeted expertise, support and training that is virtually out of reach on the skills market, a cloud consultant can elevate your cloud experience. With the right technology, advice and education, cloud partners help digitally driven companies to scale and grow. Sure, you could navigate the cloud on your own, but with experienced cloud talent at a premium, it makes sense to lean on an expert while your team gets on with building and growing your business.