Assessment, platform choice and design
Half of a good cloud design is what you decide not to move.
We decide where each workload belongs, write down why, and hand you a design any competent engineer could build from.
Most cloud decisions start with one of these.
- A contract or a data centre lease is ending, and the board wants a cloud plan.
- An acquisition came with an AWS account your team never chose.
- Nobody can say why you chose the platform you are on.
If one of these is yours, talk to us before anything moves.
Contact usWhat we take on.
What we report back
We report the decisions taken and the ones still waiting on you.
- We map your estate from the live platforms, because old diagrams are rarely current.
- Some workloads stay exactly where they are, and we say which and why.
- We assess an AWS or Google Cloud estate you inherited on its merits.
- We lay out accounts, networking and identity so every cost traces to a team.
- We agree how much data you can afford to lose, and design to it.
- We work out what it will cost to run while it is still a design.
- You can edit every document yourself, whether or not we build it.
The four documents the design work produces.
None of the four counts as done until it meets its own standard.
High-level design HLD
We set out what we will build, and why it beat the other options.
It covers what moves and where it goes, along with identity, networking, resilience and running cost.
The standard it has to meet
Your finance director can read it end to end and follow the reasoning.
Low-level design LLD
The build follows this one, so it gets argued over before anything exists.
Each detail is decided here, so nobody has to make it up halfway through the build.
The standard it has to meet
An engineer who has never met your estate could work from it without calling us.
As-built documentation
This records the estate as it stands when the build is finished.
Every place where the build departed from the design is written into it.
The standard it has to meet
Nothing is carried over from the design until it has been confirmed on the live estate.
Configuration baseline and runbooks
The estate is checked against it, and it says what to do when something drifts.
The agreed configuration is in it, with the steps for every job that will need doing again.
The standard it has to meet
Your own team can follow every runbook in it without asking the people who built the estate.
Three ways to buy the same competence.
Building it and running it afterwards are separate purchases, so you can buy one without the other.
We run it
You pay monthly, and there is no end date.
We operate an estate you own, with an assigned Solutions Architect, secondary support staff, Client Services, reporting and spend reviews included.
We build it
We scope and quote it once, against a written dependency list.
You buy a defined piece of work with an end, and we tell you when it is finished.
We work alongside you
It runs for an agreed period.
Your team runs the programme, and we add the cloud skills it is missing.
On the third, your assigned Solutions Architect oversees the work, backed by secondary support staff and Client Services. We confirm the account contacts before work starts and answer for what they deliver.
Writing the design after the decision has been taken.
The platform is chosen in a meeting, and the design is written afterwards to justify it.
There is no record of the options that lost or of who approved the winner, so when costs rise you cannot trace why.
We record the choice as it is made, with the options that were turned down and the name of whoever signed it off.
Questions we get asked.
It is where we are deepest, and most estates already run Microsoft identity, so it usually costs least to adopt. If another platform suits you better, we will say so.
No. Another firm can pick it up, and you can hold whoever builds it to what it says, us included.
Yes, and that is usually a smaller job. If we disagree with part of it, we will show you where and explain our reasoning.
It depends on how much of the estate is already written down. We find that out first, and then tell you how long the design will take.
Where this page sits.
Our work sits in three layers, and each one depends on the one beneath it. The page you are reading is marked.
You are hereCloud Strategy & Design
Foundations
Start by finding out what you run today.
The Fortnight is a fixed-scope review of your estate, and the design is built on what it finds. The findings are yours to keep, even if you stop there.
You see the scope in writing first, and nothing starts until you agree to it.