Why CRAs are for everyone
With many organisations already at some point on their journey to cloud, the idea of carrying out a cloud readiness assessment (‘CRA’) may seem a bit belated.
Migrating to Office 365, for example, seems to be a no-brainer for firms wanting better compliance, availability and mobility. A number of recent startups (we’re talking about companies set up perhaps up to ten years ago) have used nothing but public cloud services from the beginning, and are proud to boast that they’ve never owned a server. Even the largest and most conservative organisations have at least considered moving part of their workload into a hybrid environments, if not a full private cloud.
Yet we’re seeing increased demand for cloud readiness assessments (these days delivered under our specialist cloud brand, Meggha). Why is this?
The truth is that CRA is a term of convenience. It would be too long-winded to call it a ‘cloud strategy verification and sanity check’, ‘licence optimisation and business goal alignment workshop’, or ‘cost reduction, service improvement and compliance advisory examination’. Although our CRA is structured to examine business goals, workloads, resource management and opportunities for better cost management, the actual output varies widely with each client.
We’ve yet to find a customer who hasn’t been able to get direct, actionable advice from our CRA. It’s relevant in any context, from small organisations dipping their toes into cloud to large enterprises who need reliable, robust services that will save them the time, money and management overhead of running their own data centres.
Our CRA checks your existing arrangements to make sure you’re getting the service and value you need. The initial consultation is free of charge and wholly independent of vendor influence.
Why use Meggha for your CRA
Even if you’re already using cloud, not every outsourced service lives up to its promises. With tech refresh cycles as they are, and IT departments under constant pressure to improve service and reduce cost, the independent, non-aligned aspect of our consultancy adds real value.
We know our stuff. We’ve a strong heritage in managing data centre environments, and understand the pitfalls and best approaches to complex migrations, as well as being able to advise on simpler implementations and managed services. And we can cite case studies and referenceable clients including customers hosted in our own data centres.
There are also plenty of instances where we’ve taken on public cloud and productivity/collaboration as a service (PCaaS, i.e. Office 365) licence rationalisation and operational management. Many customers will already be using O365 services such as Exchange Online and Microsoft Office, but not all are aware of the wider capabilities of certain O365 subscriptions and how they could benefit their businesses, and not all have secured the data within their tenancies properly.
If you’re already contracted into a cloud service but aren’t sure you’re getting value from the investment, a CRA can provide pointers to improving quality of service, ensuring security and compliance, and getting full value for money. We may even suggest using cloud in ways you haven’t previously explored – like providing backup as a service to aid disaster recovery and business continuance.
What’s involved in a CRA?
The CRA is delivered as a workshop, and provides clarity around which cloud approach is right for each customer. It helps you understand long-term benefits and quick wins; you’ll have considered service management and data protection requirements; and you’ll know how to minimise the risks of moving to cloud services.
We take a top-down approach to assessing application cloud readiness. We start with documenting the business context and objectives to ensure goals are clear and user requirements are understood. We then move on to a discussion of the technical environment such as workloads, the relative importance of each of those workloads, and what your current physical and virtual infrastructure looks like.
The CRA covers five key areas:
- Business drivers
- Service levels
- Architecture and technology
- Service management
- Security
If you’re satisfied with the outcome and would like to proceed further, we quote for a detailed discovery exercise that delves deep into the your existing environment to assess suitability to migrate to the chosen platform(s). If you subsequently choose to engage Meggha we can not only make sure your migration goes smoothly, but our optional managed service approach maintains the environment as if it was an enterprise-class internal resource – for a consistent experience and service level.
Get started today
As you’ll have seen, there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain from our free CRA. Get in touch now to arrange a discussion with one of our specialist consultants.
