A common pitfall of cloud adoption is not considering a governance blueprint to ensure all applications are designed, secured and integrated to a common framework, often referred to as a set of guardrails which form part of your overall cloud foundations (landing zone). While it is tricky to predict all future permutations of your cloud adoption journey, you can leverage our twelve years experience of Cloud, our best practice cloud adoption framework to ensure a structured set of baseline controls to mitigate the pitfalls. All of which is tailored to your business through an agile engagement to avoid saturation of your resources and in-decision through complexity.

The engagement is executed using two agile iterations, each usually 3-weeks.

• The first iteration, referred to as Governance Sprint, leverages our cloud adoption framework to complete the design, considering key areas such as; organizational structure, security, networking (in Cloud), connectivity (between Cloud and your existing locations) and overall governance, for example, reliability, risk, compliance and cost management. The result is landing zone including guardrails tailored to the needs of your business whilst abstracting requirements from complexity.
• The second iteration, referred to as Foundations sprint, leverages our site reliability engineers to automate, deploy and operationalize the landing zone including guardrails for your business. This includes knowledge sharing of the tools, code templates (through an agreed repository), techniques and processes we use with transparent sharing of documentation and awareness for your teams once the engagement is complete.

The process will be executed using the following key steps:

• Discovery & requirements gathering; review your existing IT foundations including networking, security, operating model and target aspirations.
• Analysis workshop; review our recommendations and draft plan based on your requirements.
• Finalize Governance Model; as both an output of the first iteration and input to the second.
• Low level design; defining the configuration schematic to be deployed and dependent aspects such as test plan.
• Automated execution; build of the landing zone and guardrails using infrastructure as code.
• Testing; following the agreed plan and leveraging our standard validation process.
• Handover; of the deployment including code sharing and knowledge transfer.

This is a collaboration with knowledge sharing, documentation, and resources to help your teams get the skills they need for long-term business agility and maturity on Cloud.