Many product vendors out there offer an often-confusing variety of options, subscriptions and bundles for cloud-based infrastructure, platform, and application services. The selection, procurement, provisioning, configuration, administration, enablement, and support of such services all require resources and time. Usually, data and applications also need to be migrated or replaced, adding to the overall effort and risk. How will your organization be able to do all that, on top of everything else that needs to be done?
Once you have clearly envisioned your desired outcomes, enumerated your expected results and success criteria, defined your requirements, identified your constraints, validated your approach, developed your roadmap, and assessed your cloud readiness, the real fun can begin!
In the context of cloud solutions, we use the terms “implementation and delivery” to basically cover all the tasks that happen between “planning and design” (aka baseline and functional and technical specifications and project plan have all been created) and “ongoing production operations” (aka people using the solution in everyday work) states. That includes all the efforts required to turn the defined business vision into fully utilized solutions, by executing the cloud roadmap, and making appropriate adjustments along the way.
Who Will Do What During Your Cloud Migration Implementation?
We can fill one or many roles on your cloud team, to facilitate the predictable delivery of superior solutions, on time and on budget.
DivIHN’s full-lifecycle capabilities enable us to support your team through the entire cloud journey, from initial vision and high-level requirements, through specifications, design, development, implementation, deployment, enablement, support, and more. We can help you understand how to best leverage your team’s capabilities and capacity to deliver against the defined milestones, and what gaps in capability or capacity might need to be addressed.
Unlike many other digital technology service firms, we are very flexible in how we partner and work with our clients. There two broad engagement models we generally employ, either individually or in combination:
- DivIHN can supplement your existing team, supporting and working with your internal resources and other partners. We provide our expertise, additional capabilities and skillsets, and scalable supplemental bandwidth, on either a project or contract basis.
- DivIHN can be your Cloud Service Provider (CSP), directly managing and supporting your cloud environment, and working closely with your key internal decision-makers, on a monthly subscription basis.
With either of these engagement models, we can always help you ensure that you are making the best choices possible for your firm, in both the short-term and long-term.
The main difference with the CSP model is that we can act as a “one-stop shop” for all your cloud technology needs, thus consolidating and simplifying the management of your cloud environment and related solutions and services. That allows your team can focus their efforts on more of what they should be doing- helping your organization more effectively execute its mission and successfully achieve its ultimate goals.
We can leverage your in-house knowledge, and augment it with our vast experience, to increase solution impact.
By tapping into the collective know-how and passion of your internal communities and constituents, you can gain visibility into how things really work in your organization, and which improvements will really provide the most benefit across the firm. When supplemented with the unique “been there, done that” perspective of a trusted partner like DivIHN, it can have a substantial positive effect on innovation while also significantly reducing risk. The insights gained from such collaboration can lead to dramatic (and often measurable) increases in the real and perceived impact of your cloud solutions.
One sure-fire way to improve the conversion of potential value into real value is by explicitly focusing on the end user experience, in terms of both the migration process and the rollout of new systems. It is no secret that people are resistant to change to varying degrees. Getting whole organizations to accept change is always challenging. Enticing multiple diverse groups to actually embrace such change? That can be very difficult indeed, but if you can manage to do so, it usually leads to game-changing organizational transformation. Let us show you the way.
How Will You Maximize Migration Quality and Speed, While Minimizing Cost?
We can bring adaptability, efficiency, and rigor to your design, development, and deployment efforts, to drive quality and utilization.
Moving your data and applications from legacy systems to new cloud platforms is a big step. Even if existing solutions no longer meet the needs of a growing and evolving organization, people often have (sometimes strong!) attachments to the tried-and-true. If you want to have any chance of convincing your end users that new solutions actually are better than the old ones, it is crucial that you start with a foundation of credibility and trust. In order to do all that, there are three aspects that require explicit focus.
First, the migration process must be transparent and adaptive. It is important to provide clear communication to all about what data and which applications are being affected by the migration, and what changes and improvements can be expected as result. Actively involving key constituents throughout the whole lifecycle will enhance their perceptions of the process. It can also facilitate faster and better recognition of potential issues, which allows dynamic adjustments to be made earlier and with less disruption. The end result is usually higher-quality solutions, and happier users. DivIHN’s cloud migration approach seamlessly incorporates these concepts, and our functional experts are adept at facilitating nimble and adaptive delivery methodologies.
Second, the migration process must be as efficient as possible (within reason). Moving business-critical data from legacy systems to new ones usually involves various degrees of pre-filtering, transformation, and validation, and the levels of effort required can be difficult to calculate initially. The same is true to an even greater degree in the applications realm, where the work required to re-engineer or replace existing capabilities can vary by orders of magnitude. Inefficient and unpredictable migration efforts can seriously undermine the delivery and adoption of cloud solutions. We can help you choose the right tools and techniques to improve cloud migration efficiency, predictability, and credibility.
Third, the migration process must be sufficiently rigorous. It is imperative that you have the right people involved and engaged throughout the effort, to ensure that all the relevant perspectives are considered and incorporated at each stage of the migration process. Not only will that reduce the likelihood of errors and omissions, but the added rigor will also encourage acceptance and adoption of the resulting solutions.
When a strong cross-functional team has a well-conceived roadmap and is provided with the best tools and techniques for the tasks at hand, it becomes possible, indeed probable, that the results will exceed quality expectations even while reducing time and cost of delivery. Best of all, it can lead to increased acceptance, adoption, and ultimately, business value. DivIHN can guide and support you every step of the way.
We can enhance the depth, breadth, and scalability to your team, to accelerate time-to-value and optimize costs.
Having followed the tenets of good communications, planning and design during the early stages of your journey, it is likely that you have built up some anticipation, and maybe even excitement, for the benefits that your new cloud solutions will bring to your organization. Few things can undermine such goodwill more quickly that a delayed or stalled implementation effort. Unexpected challenges will certainly arise during any non-trivial migration, and your ability to quickly adapt and overcome obstacles and maintain momentum can have a dramatic effect on the overall success of the initiative.
One of DivIHN’s greatest strengths is our ability to quickly bring the best and most appropriate talent to bear for each client and project. Our staffing philosophy is based on a “best of all worlds” approach, which combines the benefits (while minimizing the downsides) of full-time local employees, near-shore and offshore associates, well-known contractors, and highly qualified partners. This enables DivIHN with unparalleled access to a deep and broad range of knowledge and skillsets, which can scale easily as your needs require. That means that we can support and extend your team, supplement your internal resources, fill any gaps in skills, and expand your bandwidth. Our approach also allows us to engage lower-cost resources for applicable tasks, which helps control costs. The result is that we can help compress your schedule, deliver a high-quality experience, accelerate the time-to-value for your solutions, and ultimately improve the overall return on your cloud technology investments.
DivIHN Implementation and Delivery Services
We offer broad spectrum of cloud products, solutions and consulting services, including:
- Network and Security Engineering
- Platform Configuration
- Cloud Migration
- Productivity Enablement
- Development Operations
- Custom Solution Development
For more information about DivIHN’s products, solutions, and services, please contact us at [email protected]
