Cloud Modernization: Making Informed Decisions

At Rackspace Technology®, we specialize in helping businesses adopt cloud technology and working practices to fulfill their vision and achieve their goals. We help our customers on a cloud assessment, transformation, management, and optimization journey into a new enhanced mode of operation. In this blog, we’ll focus on the initial advisory stage of that process.

In all walks of life, it's usually a good thing to seek advice from multiple sources before undertaking a new initiative. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but there are numerous examples of failure owing to a lack of foresight — something which could have been anticipated if only the right advice had been sought and acted on at the outset.

• Could the overspend on Boston's 'Big Dig' or the Queen Elizabeth tube line in London been avoided if better professional advice had been taken at the start?
• Could Blockbuster Video have adapted to the emerging digital marketplace and leveraged video streaming technology to remain competitive?
• Could a better understanding of customer needs have prevented Coca-Cola's disastrous 1985 attempt to replace its flagship cola with a new formula ("New Coke")?

Get expert advice before you start your cloud modernization program

For any organization or business, embarking on a digital transformation or IT modernization program is a major undertaking, and only some have the internal skills and experience necessary to ensure success. Only the largest enterprises typically have the skills and resources to plan and expedite such initiatives, and many would argue that even they should seek external perspectives when developing and implementing their cloud strategy.

Exploring cloud possibilities and processes

This is why, at the start of an engagement, Rackspace Technology offers customers a range of advisory services to help them gauge their readiness to adopt the cloud. Our mission is to help customers embrace cloud technology to deliver their future, and to achieve that, it is necessary to discover the key drivers behind a customer initiative, to understand the desired outcomes, and then to explore the options available for achieving them.

Our first step is to understand the business outcomes you want from your cloud transformation. Examples include improved business agility, enhanced customer experience, improved operational efficiency or reduced risk.

To determine how your business operates, we must consider the applications your business uses and the data it processes, not just the IT infrastructure. That’s why we assess your estate across four domains of infrastructure, applications, data and security. Then we identify more specific requirements like SLAs, compliance requirements, business criticality and transaction volumes to meet your desired outcomes.

Having completed this initial discovery, we assess your capabilities across the four domains and develop possible strategies to deliver that amalgamation of business outcomes and non-functional requirements. This is where you get to leverage our expertise and experience - get the external advice that is so important to ensure the right choices are made.

We will evaluate your application portfolio to determine which apps to migrate to the cloud, which to replace, and which to refactor. We’ll explore your software development processes to take advantage of cloud features for faster time to market (DevOps). We’ll assess your data practices and technologies and determine how these may need to be modernized to better leverage cloud capabilities. We’ll help you identify the organizational changes needed to successfully adopt cloud and the best infrastructure platform(s) to reach your goals. Finally, we’ll help you maintain or enhance your security posture.

Rackspace Technology has a celebrated, two-decade history that includes our co-authorship, alongside NASA, of the original specifications for OpenStack. We were also one of the first companies to offer managed services for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Alongside these cloud skills, we offer customers access to experts in applications and data modernization services, which we wrap with a comprehensive range of security solutions. All of these capabilities are delivered through a flexible portfolio of professional and managed services, including Rackspace Elastic Engineering, our modern, highly collaborative service model built to support the fast-changing needs of our customers.

Gain insight and a successful path to transform

By the end of the advisory stage of our engagement, we will have conducted various assessments to determine your organization's readiness for the modernization of your IT estate and operational modes. We will have helped you determine your cloud platform strategy, data strategy, application migrations strategy, and security strategy. You’ll have a roadmap and business case for the transformation program, and we’ll help you sell the whole change program to your organization.

After you obtain the necessary permission and commitment from your organization, armed with your custom cloud strategy, roadmap and action plan, you are ready to start your transformation.

Let us help you define the IT projects that will shape the future you want, and then execute on plans to reach those goals. We will help you modernize the right processes, leverage the right platforms and strengthen your security posture. Learn how Rackspace Technology can assist with the next phase of your business evolution. Get started here.