The path up to the cloud is a steep one. It forces businesses to look seriously at their IT assets and in most cases, to confront a lack of in-house skills. The provider accompanying them on this adventure needs to offer a huge range of expertise.
Over 60% of IT managers say they have encountered difficulties in keeping up with the rapid advances in cloud technologies.
The cloud’s potential is now widely understood: it can provide all the flexibility, computing power and innovation that businesses need to ensure and accelerate their digital transformation. It is no longer a question of whether or not to move into the cloud, but of defining which route to take and at what speed.
Other than startups and newly formed companies, an organisation rarely starts with a clean slate and has instead to work with what it already has in place. Over the years, it has built up an application portfolio and on-premises infrastructure that weigh heavily on its move into the cloud.
“Axians France is one of those rare companies that covers every aspect of cloud migration.”
To reach the holy grail of cloud-native computing, which uses containerisation and microservice technologies, a cloud migration strategy must take this legacy into account by defining a staged process. In the meantime, the business has to manage especially complex hybrid environments.
“A business migrates to the cloud in the hope of gaining agility and simplicity”, says Yves Pellemans, CTO and Data Analytics Director of Axians France. “But on the contrary, by increasing in maturity, it’s confronted with all the complexity of cloud technologies. It also has to manage the underlying networks and infrastructure, guarantee their security, meet GDPR requirements and control costs”.
Integrating network and security aspects
Few companies can boast an army of in-house cloud architects and cybersecurity experts. According to a recent international study by the Harvard Business Review, over 60% of IT managers say they have encountered difficulties in keeping up with the rapid advances in cloud technologies and cite a shortage of skills in this area, ZDNet reports.
The provider supporting a business through its cloud adventure needs to offer a huge range of expertise. In addition to defining a cloud migration strategy, the operation and security of cloud services must be managed, data backups automated, and business continuity and/or recovery plans (BCP/BRP) implemented.
Yves Pellemans adds that as a managed service provider, “Axians France is one of those rare companies that covers all these aspects, thanks to its various entities, each specialising in a given area but sharing the same vision and methods, and its network of a dozen service centres across France”.
From fixed-price assignments to service level agreement (SLA) contracts, Axians business units present themselves as a single point of contact for taming the complexity of cloud technologies and managing the day-to-day operation and administration of the infrastructure.
Axians business units can also provide plans for continuous improvement of cloud architectures, largely by automating certain tasks. They can also optimise cloud costs through the FinOps framework, which aims to allocate the right cloud resource in the right place, at the right cost and with the right level of security.
14/12/2022
