Most businesses are in the cloud, at least in some form. But navigating the intricacies of where to place applications and data within one or more clouds can be difficult. Our architects, engineers and consultants are experts across all major public, private and hybrid cloud solutions.

Whether you're assessing which platform or provider is right for you, looking to migrate workloads between public clouds, or trying to get the most out of multiple public clouds, we can help.

Our distinct AWS, GCP and Azure practices collaborate to develop custom solutions that deliver exceptional business outcomes, mature cloud capabilities and reduce risk. We'll show you what works, what doesn't and demonstrate how specific application workloads will operate on different public cloud platforms.

The public cloud has many benefits beyond cost savings. But there are several perceived and real inhibitors to consider:

• Security: While CSP services are considered secure from an industry-standard perspective, security concerns persist regarding how organizations use public cloud services.
• Operational and IT complexity: Cloud migration introduces a new level of complexity to how IT manages operations and new technologies. A shift in approach across people, processes and technology is needed to succeed.
• Vendor lock-in: When an organization becomes dependent on a single CSP, it can be difficult to move to a new vendor due to financial, legal or technical restraints.
• Compliance: While cloud makes it easy to select the best technology to meet business goals, an incompatible solution can lead to integration issues that put compliance in jeopardy.
• Cost: It's not always the case that a public cloud model will result in organization-wide savings, especially without a plan to manage cloud spend as you scale.
• Interoperability: It critical to understand the ability of your legacy infrastructure and systems to interact with a specific CSP's platform and services.
• Privacy: For industries that require extreme levels of data security, public cloud may not be the best option.
• Reliability: While public cloud services are generally reliable, there have been some noteworthy availability failures to be aware of.

Cloud strategy is a necessity

Working through the inhibitors above requires a comprehensive strategy that includes:

• Foundational assessments
• Application candidacy
• Governance
• Operations
• Security
• Optimization (cost, infrastructure, processes)