Setting up your cloud configuration is too important to not involve the experts
MediaTemple & CloudTweaks Thought Leadership Brand Series
So many great business ideas fail at the moment when strategy must turn to execution. Even the best laid plans often come to nothing, drowned under a tidal wave of events that force you to act and make bad decisions that send you down a path that becomes hard to exit.
Even with the tremendous power of the Amazon Web Service (“AWS”) cloud at your disposal, there are no guarantees that your plan is going to work. The best insurance that you have to safeguard your online strategy is to make sure that the right people are hosting, managing, and implementing the assets and applications that you have developed for your business.
Starting With Strategy
One of the real dangers of launching with an incomplete AWS strategy is that the focus tends to stray away from your essential products and services, and into solving cloud problems. Time and again, it’s proven to be more effective for small and medium companies to migrate using an AWS-native team of SysAdmins and Cloud Architects who understand your pathway to online growth and know how to lay the right foundations to get there. That, in turn, frees you up to do the work you were trying to bring to market in the first place.
Too often, we see one member of the IT team assigned the role of being the ‘new cloud guy’ in addition to his or her other duties, with the wildly unrealistic expectation that they are going to move the strategic assets of the company into the cloud.
“When there’s so much at stake for an organization, migration experience is an invaluable asset,” said Mark Kirstein, BitTitan’s vice president of products. “An experienced team will understand the environment and its constraints, and they’ll adeptly manage the entire process from start to finish.”
It’s unfair on the employee, and almost a guarantee that the cloud will not bring you the savings and efficiency that you desire. cloud migration needs collaboration, expertise, and a vision of where you want to go, not just in 6 months but in 6 years as well.
‘One approach I’ve seen companies use to make these determinations is through the creation of a cloud center of excellence team, or cloud “ninja team” explains Stephen Orban, author and former head of Enterprise Strategy at AWS in a blog post called ‘How to Create a Cloud Center of Excellence in Your Enterprise. “What is it?” he says. “A group that is focused on the strategy, reference architectures, governance, frameworks and management around cloud that is driving towards answering some key questions on an ongoing basis.’
The Four Landmarks on The Journey to Cloud
Media Temple has identified four distinct areas of the cloud migration process where companies benefit from working very closely with trained professionals who can manage the journey.
- Planning: Get your infrastructure and applications assessed upfront by AWS-certified Solution Architects.
- Optimization: Partner with a Service Delivery Manager who understands your business, how to set a course for growth, and understands the pitfalls, including runaway costs.
- Migration: Once the plan is set, then you can make use of an Onboarding Manager who works with a custom end-to-end plan to migrate all of your services.
- Security: A security review after migration to make certain that everything adheres to AWS’ extensive security guidelines and best practices.
In order for you hit those landmarks on-schedule and to keep the momentum moving forward, you should ensure you have the resources in place that offer the following services, and that can scale quickly:
- A portal that provides billing reports, usage forecasts, and detailed insights on your AWS cloud spend.
- AWS-certified Solution Architects,
- Dedicated onboarding managers,
- Proactive patch management to Malware scanning
These are a few of the features that Media Temple offers to its clients and the results speak for themselves.
Our projects regularly move from start to production in only two weeks.
We guarantee a response time of 15 minutes to any issues that may arise and we are proud to have a Net Promoter score of 7.5.
Your big idea requires the perfect cloud architecture, but you shouldn’t be spending time learning about load balancing, automatic server Scaling, global content distribution, compliance, and the hundreds of issues that make a cloud offering stand out.
Spend the time finding the right team, let them work out what your infrastructure should look like, and then make sure that they produce results.
Media Temple makes it easy for anyone to have a secure, scalable, and robust cloud presence. We host premium web and cloud services that power more than 1.5 million websites in 100 different countries around the world. Over 100,000 people and businesses rely on our simple tools for web hosting, one-click wordpress installs, virtual servers, domain registration, business applications, and other cloud services.
Reach out for a free assessment of your project today.
By Jeremy Daniel
