Cloud Services

Cloud Strategy and Modernization

The first step of any cloud migration is to create a proper strategy and a roadmap for cloud modernization. Stratacent can help your organization understand your current and legacy setup, and your requirements for the Cloud. We’ll leverage our partnerships with major cloud vendors, and then tailor the strategy to meet your requirements and plan a modernization roadmap. With help of our workshops, we break the requirements into two views:

Macro view looks at high-level view of total number of IT assets (applications, servers, storage, etc.) to drive the cost analysis and business case with consideration for the IT roadmap. This view helps build the business case for cloud (infrastructure vs. application vs. operations view) and also the changes that can be done on-premises to your infrastructure and application cloud ready.

Micro view is a deep dive into the application and infrastructure stack to map the application workloads to the servers, conduct code analysis, understand the business priority or SLA for each application, and develop a dependency matrix on data and third-party licenses. This allows us to categorize each application into the “6 Rs of cloud migration” and create a roadmap for application and data migration to the Cloud.

Cloud Landing Zone

The second phase of a successful adoption and deployment of the Coud for any organization begins with the effective design of the cloud landing zone.  A landing zone is the underlying core services and configuration of a cloud adoption environment. Landing zones provide a stable, standardized, and mostly pre-configured environment – provisioned through code – to host workloads. Stratacent can help design and deploy a successful landing zone that includes networking and connectivity, standardized core services, standardized compute and security.

Through our partnership with all three major cloud vendors, Stratacent’s certified teams can help with landing zones and deployments.

Microsoft AzureMicrosoft provides Cloud Adoption Framework for the creation of the landing zone.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)AWS provides AWS Landing Zone for the build-out of the landing zone.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)GCP provides Google Deployment manager for the deployment of the landing zone.

Cloud Datawarehousing

A cloud datawarehouse allows organizations to collect and store large amounts of data and run advanced analytics such as Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.

All three major cloud vendors have a data warehouse solution i.e. Google BigQuery, AWS RedShift and Microsoft Synapse. All three solutions are built on cloud storage and offer advanced analytics that are cloud native and integrate with third party analytics solutions such as SAS. In addition to cloud native data warehouse solutions, there are other vendor solutions such as Snowflake.

Stratacent can help in supporting your cloud data warehouse initiatives as follows:

Initial design and setup: While each of these vendors offer their solutions as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), there are still some design decisions to be made with regards to authentication, security encryption or even disaster recovery setup.  Stratacent can help guide you through the decision-making process and complete the setup.

Migration: Populating the data into the data warehouse is crucial. Whether you want to copy the data from your on-premises sources or build the pipeline to acquire a new data source, Stratacent can help you in migrate your information to a cloud data warehouse.

Analytics: A data warehouse is not complete without a proper  analytics toolset. Stratacent can set up a complete data scientist lab with  a wide range of toolsets including Cloud native tools as well as third-party tools such as SAS, R and Python.

Cloud Development

Stratacent can support the green-field approach or re-factoring of application to a cloud native architecture to develop and deploy the application in the Cloud.

Cloud Application Architecture: Stratacent can create an application architecture while leveraging cloud-native features such as server-less computing such as AWS Lambda, auto-scalability, geographically caching and auto-recovery of application. We can further conduct various POCs to correctly choose the technology patterns.

DevSecOps Using the CI/CD Pipeline: We can support the development effort by supporting the DevSecOps by creating the CI/CD pipeline using tools like Jenkins and GitHub. We also integrate with security scanning tools to ensure the code promotion goes through security scans as part of the deployment.

Code Development: Stratacent has the expertise to support your application development by providing the expert cloud application development resources. Whether it is front-end development using React or Angular, or server-less backend using Lambda with Python or Node.js, Stratacent can work with you to understand your requirements and provide the correct resources.

Sustainability: Stratacent uses the FCAPS (Fault, Capacity, Availability, Performance and Security) model to sustain the application as it goes to production. We deploy application and infrastructure monitoring tools to monitor and manage the application by  leveraging cloud-native tools such as AWS cloud-watch or third-party tools such as AppDynamics or Dynatrace.

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud infrastructure consists of all hardware and software components that are needed to support the delivery of cloud services to the customer. Effectively managed cloud infrastructure is critical for the adoption and sustainability of the cloud foundation for any organization.

Stratacent can help build a secure and efficient cloud operation for sustainability by leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to build and deploy the cloud infrastructure. IaC is the process of provisioning and configuring an environment through code instead of manually setting up the required devices and systems. Once code parameters are defined, users or developers run scripts, and the IaC platform builds the cloud infrastructure automatically.

The benefits of Infrastructure as Code include speed of provisioning, standardization of infrastructure across the organization, reusability of IAC Code, scalability and disaster recovery.

Stratacent can help leverage cloud-agnostic tools such as terraform, saltstack, Juju, Chef, Ansible, and Puppet to create reusable code to build the cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Migration

With proper planning and a modernization roadmap, cloud migration should be executed efficiently. Stratacent uses the  “6 R’s” as a fundamental guideline for cloud transformation:

Re-hosting: We can help with the lift and shift of the existing infrastructure stack to the Cloud. Whether you use VMWare tool stack or cloud native tools, We can execute the lift and shift your existing stack without making extensive changes for quickest ROI.

Re-platforming: This is a variation to the Re-hosting where we can support the migration to cloud native platforms. Typical use-cases involve database migration to managed database services or application containers. The overall application architecture does not change materially.

Re-purchasing: We can support migration of application functionality to a new cloud-native model (usually SaaS). This approach is more challenging but brings new functionality and could be a cost-effective option for moving away from legacy code and functionality.

Re-factoring: This is where we can take a Green-field approach to rebuild the application to a complete cloud-native architecture. Usually expensive, it is the most common approach for migration for leveraging features such as auto-scaling or server-less computing.

Retiring: As you migrate to the Cloud, there are assets (application, and servers) that are no longer required. We can help retire these assets by creating a repeatable retirement process to minimize the impact and false positives.

Retaining: After migration is complete, there are assets that can’t be moved to the Cloud either due to licenses or dependency on a particular hardware. We can support retainment of these assets on premises without jeopardizing performance or cloud connectivity.