The Coretek 5-Step Cloud Managed Service Advisory Process system is a concise tool for conceptualizing and tracking your client journey when undergoing a cloud transition. It illustrates the process behind moving workloads to the cloud and then operationalizing everything around security, financial optimization, governance, and compliance in a way that’s understandable and valuable to both your technical and executive team members simultaneously.
Coretek developed and shared our 5-Step Cloud Managed Service Advisory Process because of the depth and breadth of joining the cloud as a business. Recognizing the importance of operational management to each and every business, we found many of our clients benefitted immensely from an easily consumable guide to their cloud transformation process, and we felt creating the 5-Step Cloud Managed Services Advisory Process was a progressive way to bring them into our process and quantify their cloud journey. The Advisory Process helps conceptualize how Coretek integrates into existing IT operations while also becoming a member of your team to support your cloud environment.
Let’s dive into each phase of the 5-Step CloudManaged service Advisory Process below.
The Assess stage is where Coretek meets most of our customers. Our client’s goals usually involve either deploying new workloads to Azure or moving existing workloads to Azure, both of which necessitate Coretek preliminarily assessing your current situation. Coretek will leverage the Microsoft Solutions Assessment Program to determine:
Defining these three items gives everyone involved a concrete understanding of the cost of ownership for the initiative.
All assessments completed through the Microsoft Solutions Assessment Program are done via Microsoft Paper, which means the only thing required to conduct an assessment is a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), negating the need for any Master Service Agreement (MSA) or contract between you and Coretek. Most clients require assessments that are run via Azure Migrate, which typically include data collection, recommended pivots, and a presentation. Larger Enterprise businesses may require a more complex assessment process with specific needs that may involve investigating platform services factoring into operational plans. More in-depth assessments may require an MSA.
Some of our smaller clients are eligible for our 5-step process but may not qualify for the Microsoft Solutions Assessment Program. That is because the rules of the program require them to be Microsoft Managed customers. Unmanaged Microsoft Customers may not have the account team required to effectively assess the situation.
When you make the transition to Azure, a landing zone must first be established. The Plan phase is solely focused on the cloud adoption framework. We start with a few technical sessions with your security team so we can understand your technical environment, present security environment, and current security practices. Coretek also talks to your operations team to understand any rules for monitoring patching and other current practices. These sessions will help determine your:
All of this helps ensure that the workloads we push into Azure follow the proper policies, set efficient naming conventions, use resource tagging, and ensure workloads are matching Coretek’s security department standards.
Also colloquially referred to as the “adopt” stage, the Migrate stage is when your workloads are moved to Azure. Whether this stage is a true migration or an adoption depends on your preexisting relationship with Azure. If it is a true migration, Coretek has a 5-Week plan for migrating workloads to Azure, using Azure Migrate. If you need new workloads deployed as part of this process, Coretek is also capable of deploying greenfield projects. For certain Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) projects, this stage may require offsetting a Citrix environment, and Coretek is capable of replacing that legacy environment.
The Migrate stage is often the most challenging for all parties involved, as it necessitates finding a way to migrate assets while enabling continuous business operations without causing disruption. Coretek executes this through thoughtful prioritization to avoid any and all disorganization.
The management stage is where we ensure we have the right tools, resources, and skilled personnel available and examine any management-related processes from IT-service management to event management. This is where we ensure proper:
Optimize and Manage are two stages that exist hand-in-hand. Once the management protocols have been established and are functioning well, Coretek takes the opportunity to seek improvement within those practices. The cloud is ever-changing, and there are always new tools and ways to do things. The goal of cloud managed services is to provide the best and most efficient product possible, and that includes constant improvements from your managed services provider. This manifests through automation, sunsetting or modernizing legacy applications that are no longer serving you in the best way possible, and examining financial operations to eliminate waste.
The need for the Optimize stage is inherently vital when using Azure as your solution. Azure is an especially unique space, with features and tools being released weekly, and ensuring that you are taking full advantage of those opportunities is an integral part of the optimization stage.
Ready to begin your cloud managed services journey? Connect with the Coretek team to complete your cloud transformation!
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