When looking for a cloud enablement service provider, it is important that you must follow a thorough and systematic checklist to ensure you find the right solution partner. But before that, you must invest time to understand the position of your company’s cloud transformation maturity. Your company’s cloud maturity serves as a key factor to recognize the types of cloud enablement solutions your organization needs. If your company is at a higher level of cloud maturity, you will require more advanced and specialized cloud enablement solutions to further optimize your cloud-based operations. If your company is at lower levels or at a beginner level of cloud maturity, you will require simple and more straightforward cloud enablement solutions to begin your journey to cloud-based operations.
To find an ideal cloud enablement service provider, it is important that you identify your organization’s cloud maturity level and consider the challenges you are facing, what kind of technical and transformational activities will a cloud enablement expert perform, and what outcomes or milestones will the consultant or engineer help with to achieve the cloud maturity. In the below section, we will discuss the aforementioned points in detail which will help you understand your position and the level of support your company needs from cloud enablement experts.
1. Cloud Maturity Stage 1
At stage one, a company or organization is considered the one that has limited knowledge of cloud and cloud service and they don’t have executive support to enable a new IT environment. Apart from this, companies under this section are unable to purchase required services and have limited confidence in cloud service capabilities. No clear ownership or direction for adoption is yet another challenge faced by beginners in the cloud. Cloud enablement service providers here allow transformation support by bringing in awareness of the cloud through training or education. They also share case studies on use cases faced by companies like yours to understand proven ROI from cloud solutions. They allow you to develop and use existing contracts or create a new contract as well as conduct POC to validate solutions and take you from the discovery phase to the implementation phase to get you milestones like executive support, knowledge, and the ability to buy new or all required resources, increase confidence and fewer concerns and bring IT ownership and clear strategy and direction.
2. Cloud Maturity Stage 2
At stage two, cloud enablement experts help an organization set up a foundation for cloud consideration, and cloud migration, and enable them to understand cloud TCO to meet the organizational requirements. They help in assigning the required cloud resources and efficiently drive the transformation. Professional assistance also addresses your challenge of developing a detailed transformational plan including cost and security management while ensuring compliance and data storage concerns. For this, they help you set up a centralized cloud center of excellence (CCoE), assist with end-to-end governance and migration needs while aligning the security needs with your selected cloud providers, and share cloud cost models through workshops. They address your organization’s people, processes, and technologies with cloud and DevOps best practices, policies, and procedures. Detailed TCO for the proposed operating model is yet another outcome a cloud expert helps your company to leverage.
3. Cloud Maturity Stage 3
Organizations that are at stage three are considered cloud aware. But, they require expert assistance in using cloud services and tools to migrate applications and workloads to the cloud. They need someone that can help them design an effective migration strategy and implement it effectively. And top of it, organizations at this level look for technical capabilities where cloud enablement experts also help them in managing cloud-based workloads and environments after migration with selected cloud or partner implementation tools and services. The advantage of using professional cloud enablement services is that organizations leverage a cost-efficient and effective application modernization process. As an organization, you level efficient and effective portfolio management with robust governance and security.
4. Cloud Maturity Stage 4
After cloud adoption and migration, companies are often stuck with surprising cloud bills. Dealing with cloud resources and their operating model is not an easy job. If your company is dealing with the challenges of optimizing the cost of cloud management, service management, application management, and complete optimization of enterprise services, consider yourself at stage four. Here, a cloud enablement service provider allows you to leverage the right cloud tools and features to continually improve operational costs, including consolidated billing, RIs discounts, and others to optimize cost. They also help with selecting cloud tools that continuously improve service management processes and allow you to adopt cloud best practices such as DevOps and CI/CD to enable better application management methods in place. They work closely with your stakeholders and continuously seek ways to aggregate and improve shared services.
Conclusion
This is a close relationship between cloud maturity and cloud enablement solutions. Therefore, when you analyze the level of development and advancement of your organization for the use of cloud computing technologies, you can begin with cloud enablement services to adopt the tools, services, and processes to maximize and optimize cloud usage and controls. You can also include these specifications in your checklist to find the most appropriate cloud enablement service providers; technical expertise, customer references, service offerings, pricing and value, security and compliance, support and maintenance, scalability, and long-term commitment a company offers, and is assured for.
