Matthew Steele
Technical Practice Lead - Public Cloud & EUC
Cloud assessment tools vary vastly, and it can be confusing deciding which one is the best fit for your organisation. As we covered in our last blog, here at Softcat, we think that the best way to get the right cloud for your organisation is to combine an assessment tool with the experience and care of a public cloud expert. We believe the best approach is to take the assessment in a careful, considered way, and have developed a three-phase approach that we recommend for any organisation embarking on a cloud migration.
Advanced Cloud Assessment
Phase 1
It’s important to understand the services and applications that you currently use within your organisation, and to look at your business objectives and future plans. This will help you to build a picture of your current state and help you to look ahead to where you want to be. We spend time with you in a workshop to get a clear picture of what your cloud needs to hold, to make sure you are adding the most value to your organisation. Together, we also look at some of the services available – for example, SaaS and PaaS options. It’s also important to look at additional elements that a standalone cloud assessment tool wouldn’t pick up, for example, connectivity requirements (site-to-site VPN, ExpressRoute), data sovereignty requirements and application architecture requirements.
Phase 2
The next phase is all about gathering data from your existing servers to gauge usage, memory size, CPU core count and any application specific requirements and dependencies. This will show exactly what’s currently going on and give a good indication of your cloud requirements. This is the technical bit that gives us a base from which to build our recommendations.
Phase 3
The last phase brings together the information we gather at phase one and two. Using the material from the workshop together with the technical data we collect, we present a report to clearly lay out a recommended approach to cloud migration, specific to your current requirements as well as your future objectives. This report covers each of the workloads we’ve jointly identified as suitable for the public cloud, based on our ‘6Rs’ (retire, re-host, re-platform, retain, refactor, repurchase) as well as giving a guideline of monthly costs, so you can manage expectation and budget accordingly. Together, we can present the findings to your business decision makers, if you choose, outlining the next steps.
What's next?
We’ve seen this approach work well for a range of organisations, combining insights generated by a tool with human intelligence to give greater detail and a tailormade solution. If you’d like to find out how our Advanced Cloud Assessment Service could work for you, contact your Softcat Account Manager or hit the button below.