It’s never too late, or too early, to analyze your cloud program. At Infinitive, we strongly believe it’s worth taking a few weeks to dig into your cloud needs, whether you’re in the planning stages or have been using the cloud for years. A good assessment will help you discover ways to increase your cloud migration velocity, bolster user adoption, improve processes, and optimize your environments.

Over the years, we’ve found companies face common difficulties. Do any of these sound familiar?

• Larger than expected cloud spending with no clear reason
• Delayed progress due to a lack (or perceived lack) of team skills
• Varying approaches, numerous cloud accounts, and a lack of standardization
• Security concerns or audit findings that are impeding progress
• Difficulty moving, managing, or effectively utilizing data in the cloud
• Lack of user adoption or buy-in
• Inconsistent/unknown approach for developers working in the cloud

Many of these problems arise because companies haven’t taken the time to devise a cloud strategy and governance framework. Infinitive’s Cloud Health Check assessment can help.

Like any good assessment process, the Cloud Health Check asks questions. A lot of them. Think of it like the paperwork you fill out before seeing a new doctor—but on steroids. Our Cloud Health Check starts with a seven-part survey containing around 200 questions total. Sometimes you won’t have answers to certain questions, but that in itself provides information.

Over the course of a few weeks, we also conduct interviews with key business, security, and technology stakeholders and examine your existing cloud environment.

We’ve built our Cloud Health Check around seven critical areas:

Cloud governance strategy and execution. Cloud governance is fundamental to maintaining a successful implementation year after year and can inform the decisions you make as you move to the cloud. Strong cloud governance encompasses the organizational structures, people alignment, policies, procedures, technologies, and processes needed to manage your cloud program across the organization and drive business outcomes.

Identity and access management. It’s crucial that the right people have the right access levels to the right services. This includes users, groups, roles, permissions, and service access. Access and permissions are dynamic, and your processes, controls, and environments need to be able to handle this.

Business drivers and FinOps. Identifying your specific business outcomes can help you advance business priorities and minimize risks or costs. A robust financial operations (FinOps) function will ensure your cloud spend is well-managed and transparent and gives you the ability to do billing and chargebacks within your organization if desired.

Developer experience. One benefit of the cloud is that you can accelerate innovation through shared services, common tools, and reusable components. It’s important to devise a strategy and framework to maximize developer productivity while maintaining your company’s risk posture. All developers with cloud access commit “cloud spend” on behalf of the organization—having the right FinOps mindset and developer guardrails reduces bill shockers (unwanted/unused cloud spend).

Cloud provisioning and account setup. By setting up the proper provisioning for cloud accounts and considering a multi-account approach, you are reducing your cybersecurity blast radius—the amount of damage that could happen from one credential’s misuse or theft.

Cloud security compliance and operations. A number of recognized cybersecurity standards exist, including NIST 800-53, HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP, and ISO 27001. It’s important to establish your own cloud security policies and procedures using these standards and to continually monitor and manage cyber risk across your cloud implementation to minimize exposure. An organization should also take advantage of cloud service providers’ shared cloud responsibility model to inherit the security controls CSPs have built over the last decade.

Data transformation. A holistic approach to data organization and management in the cloud drives data democratization across your organization while minimizing risk. How an organization ingests, stores, transforms, manages, and makes data available for applications, analytics, and AI/ML is critical for user adoption and data security.

By the end of the Cloud Health Check, you’ll be able to understand your current cloud program and implementation progress; identify “quick-hit” improvements; and improve your go-forward strategy to attain desired business outcomes.

We’ll leave you with:

• Recommendations to improve the metrics and KPIs utilized to manage your cloud program
• Shared understanding of the state of your cloud program across stakeholders and the most critical gaps that need to be addressed

Infinitive is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and our consultants bring industry experience and AWS certification know-how to each engagement. Our cloud experts have the skills and experience to get you started in the cloud or make your current cloud program more efficient and secure. Reach out today and let’s start a conversation.