A Comprehensive Guide to Essential Cloud Assessments
In this blog, we’ll delve into the diverse range of cloud assessments we offer, each serving an important function on your cloud journey. These tools evaluate your organisation’s readiness, define cloud strategies, and deliver actionable insights to optimise operations.
Depending on where you are in your cloud journey, The Argo will build a cloud assessment package to suit your business requirements. From migration and modernisation to cost management and efficiency, these assessments provide invaluable insights that enable you to make informed decisions as you shape your cloud transformation. Below we outline the distinct value of each assessment, keeping in mind that they collectively drive cloud excellence.
The Well-Architected Framework Assessment
This assessment provides a structured approach to evaluating cloud workloads, identifying strengths, and pinpointing areas for improvement or optimisation. By aligning with the five pillars; Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimisation; you gain a comprehensive understanding of your cloud infrastructure’s health.
Depending on where you are in your cloud journey, the WAF assessment results in actionable insights for your current cloud environment. Alternatively, if you have yet to start your journey the assessment will define a strategic and technological roadmap for your move to the cloud. The goal of the assessment is to deliver enhanced security, streamlined operations, bolstered reliability, and optimised performance, alongside cost efficiency. It’s the blueprint for building a resilient, high-performing, and cost-effective cloud environment propelling businesses toward digital success.
The well-architected framework assessment is a rigorous five-part analysis of the current environment with a view to the future state needs of the business. This assessment requires a lot of input and collaboration from the team as it is fundamental to every step of the cloud migration, as well as the app modernisation journey.
Cloud Journey Tracker
The Cloud Journey Tracker is a navigational tool, that provides a view of your cloud transition progress. Whether you’re migrating applications or optimising operations, this tool equips you with actionable insights to assess progress, address challenges, and surface opportunities. The Cloud Journey Tracker ensures you stay on track with your cloud goals.
Cloud Adoption Framework | CAF | Plan, Ready & Adopt
The Cloud Adoption Framework is a strategic guide that covers the entire lifecycle of cloud adoption, from initial planning to ongoing optimisation. It is a comprehensive set of best practices, guidelines, and methodologies that provides a structured approach for organisations to plan, design, implement, and govern their cloud adoption strategy.
The assessment encompasses a broader scope, offering guidance on how to navigate the entire cloud adoption journey. The framework addresses considerations like defining business objectives, selecting appropriate cloud services, establishing governance policies, designing architectures, managing operations, and optimising costs. It provides a roadmap for organisations to achieve successful and holistic cloud adoption aligned with their business goals.
App & Data Modernisation Readiness Assessment
This assessment methodically evaluates existing applications and data infrastructure, uncovering opportunities for modernisation. By considering the technological future state and analysing dependencies, performance bottlenecks, and security measures, it paves the way for informed decision-making regarding technological architecture, DevOps and operational delivery. This assessment serves as a bridge between legacy systems and future-ready solutions, ensuring that businesses can harness the power of modern technology while optimising performance, security, and innovation.
Cloud Adoption Strategy
Developing a Cloud Adoption Strategy is akin to architecting a blueprint for digital evolution. This strategy outlines a clear path, aligning technology adoption with organisational goals. By assessing existing infrastructure, applications, and workloads, it determines the optimal approach—whether it’s gradual migration, application refactoring, or embracing cloud-native services. It considers scalability, cost efficiency, and security factors, ensuring a seamless transition. A well-defined Cloud Adoption Strategy is a roadmap aligned to business objectives, to ensure the full potential of the cloud is realised.
Strategic Migration & Readiness Assessment
This assessment plays a pivotal role in guiding organisations toward successful migrations. It delivers a comprehensive evaluation of existing systems, applications, and infrastructure. By identifying dependencies, performance bottlenecks, and potential risks, it lays the foundation for the migration plan. This assessment ensures that businesses embark on their migration journey with clarity, preparedness, and a deep understanding of the steps required to achieve a seamless transition to the cloud environment.
Landing Zone Review or Implementation Strategy
This strategy assesses or establishes the landing zone—a well-structured foundation that encompasses governance, security, networking, and resource management. By ensuring alignment with best practices, it guarantees a secure and efficient starting point for cloud operations. Whether reviewing an existing landing zone or implementing a new one, this review results in a strategy that empowers businesses to navigate the complexities of cloud architecture with confidence, laying the groundwork for scalability, security, and efficiency.
Governance Benchmarking Review or Implementation Strategy
The Importance of DevOps Assessments
DevOps is an integral form of delivery vital to cloud success, transparent, efficient and de-risked projects alongside broad-based cost efficiencies as well as the continued evolution of cloud architectures.
Fundamentally, cloud architecture is constructed differently to on-premise data centres. Correspondingly, the delivery and architecting methodology required to build a cloud environment needs to enable the development team as well as support the cloud environment. An on-premises methodology would not adequately support a cloud environment and could have far-reaching consequences. As such, The Argo utilises DevOps throughout our products, cloud implementations, remediations, and modernisation services.
DevOps Developer Velocity Assessment
The DevOps Developer Velocity Assessment is a transformative process for businesses that understand the need to optimise their development processes in order to deliver business agility, efficiency and innovation. This assessment evaluates the DevOps practices and tools utilised by development teams, identifying areas for strategic implementation, improvement and acceleration depending on the team’s DevOps maturity.
Through the analyses of workflows, automation, collaboration, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, it lays the foundation for increased developer velocity. This approach empowers businesses to propel their development cycles forward and understand where bottlenecks and inefficiencies exist, fostering faster releases, improved collaboration, and a culture of innovation.
DevOps Capability Assessment
This assessment evaluates an organisation’s DevOps maturity, analysing processes, automation, cultural alignment, and tooling. By identifying strengths and areas for enhancement, it forms the basis for targeted improvements that drive efficiency and agility. Whether assessing current DevOps capabilities or implementing strategies to elevate them, this approach empowers businesses to cultivate a high-performing DevOps culture, accelerating software delivery, minimising bottlenecks, and ensuring a seamless alignment between development and operations.
Tailored Cloud Strategies Based on Synergistic Assessments
In this guide to impactful Cloud Assessments, we’ve explored various assessments, each finely tuned to specific stages of your cloud journey. These assessments offer more than individual insights—they synergistically empower you with a strategic advantage.
They enable the evaluation of cloud readiness, development of optimal strategies and identify modernisation opportunities. Each assessment contributes purposefully to define your cloud transformation journey. Based on your business’s goals and environment, you have the power to combine these assessments in order to develop a tailored strategy for your business. Collectively, these assessments construct a roadmap that guides your decisions, sharpens your planning, and paves the way to transformative cloud success.
Ultimately, this mosaic of assessments forges a resilient, secure, and optimised cloud landscape, anchoring your organisation’s digital future in strategic foresight and measurable progress.
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