Cloud Evaluations

Enterprises continue to move a significant portion of their applications to the Cloud and examine the remaining ones for Cloud viability.    Selection of the right Cloud vendor or provider is a critical business decision and one that can be a make or break IT department budgets.  The Cloud offerings from various vendors and their details can make the selection process very confusing.  It is practically impossible to perform an apples to apples comparison.  Most companies will adopt a multiple Cloud vendor approach.  The big three in this space are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) followed by IBM Cloud and several smaller vendors.  The application migration journey moving from on premises hosting to the Cloud is one that is fraught with potential hazard.  This is the reason why a majority of Cloud Migrations suffer from late deliveries and budget overruns.   It is very important that IT departments find a suitable consulting vendor to assist in this enterprise activity.

Cloud migrations are complex and may involve re-programming a part of the application code.  A competent consulting partner can help iron out these pitfalls, set realistic expectations and ultimately save the client significant sums of money and heartburn. For example, are you aware that JWT does not behave the same way on AWS as it does for an in-house .NET Core application?  AWS has its own implementation of JWT and substantial code changes may be needed to get the application to work properly on AWS.  Another fact is related to cost.  AWS Lambda charges customers for each call made between servers.  With the Micro Services architecture that is adopted by many applications, companies may be in for a surprise when they receive their bill from AWS.  Micro Services are great for scalability, supporting cross platform functions and developer productivity however, a stable business application with a fixed or slow growing number of users may be better served by optimizing calls between servers to push more data in a standard Web Service between tiers or even a stored procedure as opposed to the Micro Services approach.  These are just a couple of technical and cost associated reasons for selecting a good consulting partner that is Cloud vendor agnostic.  Consulting companies that are certified in AWS,  Azure or GCP are almost certain to push you in a specific vendor’s direction depending upon their revenue and employee’s expertise instead of performing an impartial and unbiased evaluation.

PCS adopts an agnostic approach to Cloud vendor selection. We can help you and your organization perform Cloud evaluations and decisions by leveraging our real world experience and best practices.  PCS can assist in the development and implementation of a Cloud Strategy and Cloud Migration Methodology for your company. We provide domain knowledge and a structured selection process or methodology including the following:

  • Cloud Strategy
  • Application Portfolio Cloud Analysis
  • Individual Application Code Evaluation
  • RFP Process If Needed
  • Cloud Migration Methodology
  • Application Code Changes If Needed
  • DevOps Tools
  • Cloud Testing
  • Cloud Deployment
  • Cloud Cutover
  • ROI Update