What to Look for in a Cloud Migration Partner

Cloud computing has existed for decades but recent events caused by COVID-19 have reaffirmed its importance. From contact tracing to workplace landscape, even during the wake of uncertainty caused by COVID-19- cloud proved to be the backbone of accessible information and data-driven insights.

While a cloud migration enables revolutionary toolsets, a successful and trouble-free project is no easy task. Every use case is unique and proposes its own complexity and challenges. Fortunately, cloud consulting services exist. This article will guide you in finding the right cloud migration partner that will address your immediate needs while setting you up for long-term success. 

By now, we are well aware of the benefits of cloud computing: 

• cost savings
• reduced hardware footprint 
• less infrastructure time and more time for innovative work
• scalability
• disaster recovery

Using a Cloud Consultant

Organizations typically hire consultants for one of two reasons- a lack of resources and workers or a lack of expertise and experiences. Because consultants have encountered an extensive variety of projects and situations, they are better suited for a smooth and successful cloud transition. Most hiring organizations do not have cloud migration experience in-house. A do-it-yourself approach can sometimes cause unnecessary stumbles. For example, decisions made with limited knowledge can result in longer project duration, improper architectures, limited scalability, and performance degradations. Veteran workers know what works and what does not- this shapes best practice processes. Once established, best practice configurations provide stability benefits at a foundational level.  Future problems with project architecture are minimized simply because consultants know what works best. Regardless of the reason for hiring consultant engineers, leveraging one brings additional benefits and new knowledge to the work effort.

Skills & Resources

Not all consultants advertised as “cloud experts” are equal.  When choosing the right consultant it is essential that your partner is equipped with the right resources and technologies to tackle the cloud migration. Consultants that have partnerships with other organizations and technologies are better skilled in solving specific issues. 

Zirous strives to be technology agnostic and is partnered with multiple cloud platforms ( Azure, AWS, Google, Oracle, etc.) This allows our engineers to select the technology product that best matches a client’s environment and needs. While it varies from vendor to vendor, to qualify as a partner, a consulting firm typically has to attain a certain level of expertise with a vendor’s systems. With multiple certifications and partnerships in place, Zirous understands the tradeoffs between vendors and tailor a transition with the technology product that best matches a client’s needs. This knowledge also allows for quicker integration of a vendor’s system into an organization while ensuring the client is set up for success.

Future Focused

When looking for the right consultant it is essential to pick a partner that sees the big picture and sets a strategy for both immediate and long-term success.

At Zirous, when working on a cloud migration project, our philosophy with all of our clients is to be an ally with them to navigate the complexities of a cloud implementation.  Zirous strives to be a long-term partner.  We typically do not act solely as a staff augmentation provider.  Instead, we prefer to establish a rapport with our clients that allows us to provide continuing support over time across many project initiatives.  We prefer to be your strategic cloud technology partner, both for initial setup and future management.  Instead of coming in solely to do the life-and-shift migration into the cloud, Zirous will partner with our client to architect a solution, implement that solution and provide cloud management services in the future to support that solution

Being present across the entire lifecycle of a project, and being able to support a successful cloud implementation provides benefits to our clients.  Understanding a cloud implementation provides invaluable insight when future problems or changes arise.  Knowing the reason why a technology decision was made informs future architecture decisions.  Additional phases of a cloud migration project move faster because Zirous has prior knowledge of a client’s cloud technology configuration.

The Zirous Approach

While every client project is different, Zirous typically follows a similar process when we work with clients. In general, here are some of the things we do to help ensure success for our clients.

1. Understand our clients’ business.  We find that just about all projects require a good understanding of how business functions to be successful. 
2. Make best practice recommendations.  Our experience working with multiple clients having various situations allows us to experience many solutions.  In some cases, we’ve seen what doesn’t work.  We can help clients avoid pitfalls.
3. Provide support for decision-making.  Sometimes clients prefer to have an outside perspective to provide justification for a decision.  Our best practice recommendations can help with that.
4. Architect solution.  Sometimes, the success of a project depends on this piece more than others.  We can provide solutions that will work for our clients.
5. Implement a solution.  We have skilled personnel that can ensure the project is a success!.
6. Debugging and testing.  All projects are iterative in nature and something always turns up that nobody thought of originally.  We feel this is normal and we work closely with our clients to resolve issues as they surface through validation and testing, lead by the customer.
7. Share knowledge.  We have found clients sometimes feel uncomfortable letting a consultant come in and change things because they don’t fully understand what was changed.  Part of our practice is to share our knowledge of what we have done.  We can also provide mentoring and training services if it is required.
8. Provide full documentation.  Most times our process includes writing up detailed documentation, including screenshots of a step-by-step process.  We can produce detailed architecture and specification documentation to fit a project’s needs.

When you are looking for a cloud migration partner, consider the aforementioned topics. You should select a partner that will drive toward results that solve your specific business problems and help you set a systematic approach for success. Choose Zirous, you will be glad you did.