A cloud consultant is an IT professional who specialises in cloud technology and solutions, including having an in-depth understanding of leading cloud providers, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. Essentially, they’re vital in maximising your cloud opportunity, whether you opt for public, private, or hybrid cloud.
In this article, we’ve explored what cloud consulting is, the different types of consultants, how your business can benefit from cloud consultancy, and the considerations to make when choosing an advisor.
What does a cloud consultant do?
Typically working with your business in an advisory role, cloud consultants provide guidance around everything from cloud architecture to DevOps, security, and storage – as well as practical involvement including aiding the transition from local servers to the cloud and delivering actionable cloud optimisation strategies and ongoing care.
1. Audit your IT infrastructure
One of the first jobs your cloud consultant will complete is a thorough audit of your existing IT infrastructure, to see where you could benefit from new, improved processes. This will allow them to assess what’s currently up to scratch, but more importantly any bottlenecks and inefficiencies that are inhibiting business operations.
2. Deliver a custom cloud strategy
Following an in-depth IT audit, your cloud consultant will be able to create a tailored strategy, centred around business goals, budgets, and priorities. They’ll identify everything from cloud storage needs to existing security concerns and recommend relevant cloud-compatible applications that’ll streamline actions.
3. Provide the cloud migration process
Next up, your dedicated cloud consultant will collaborate with you to develop a detailed plan of action for securely transitioning your data and applications onto the cloud. This can be quite complex, so you’ll need expert consultancy along the way to ensure a smooth and secure process and avoid heavy disruption and long periods of downtime.
4. Implement the cloud migration
With the full cloud migration process mapped out, your cloud consultant will execute the relevant actions, including securely moving all of your data to your chosen platform. As they implement the migration, your advisor will work with you to minimise disruption and make sure everything functions properly in the new environment.
5. Cloud management and optimisation
Once you’ve successfully migrated to the cloud, you’ll receive ongoing cloud consultancy and maintenance advice. Your dedicated advisor will regularly monitor your cloud environment, and identify inefficiencies, points of optimisation and ways to get the most out of your investment, and growth opportunities where scaling might be a solution.
The different types of cloud consultancy
Of course, your business might not necessarily need complete cloud consultancy across all stages of the journey – you might instead need specific expertise around a certain service, or simply require an ongoing advisor. In this case, there are a handful of common types of consulting to consider.
Cloud advisory
If you’re unsure exactly what kind of consultation you need, a cloud advisor sounds like your perfect fit. They’ll work with you to get a thorough understanding of your business challenges, IT infrastructure, and internal processes, to navigate the complexities that come with the cloud and identify the best ways to maximise efficiency.
Cloud optimisation
Migrating to the cloud can quickly improve and streamline business processes, but it’s important to have dedicated consultancy that offers further, ongoing optimisation opportunities to ensure you’re always running at maximum efficiency. Your cloud optimisation advisor will help you manage resources, leverage automation, and scale necessary services and applications where required.
Data and analytics
Your cloud environment can be a data goldmine, but it takes an experienced expert to unlock, understand, and leverage the masses of available information. Using analytics tools, your cloud consultant can design effective data pipelines and develop organised data warehouses – as well as review ongoing trends to maximise efficiency.
Cloud security
When operating in the cloud, it’s important to ensure your data and applications are fully secure against malware and corruption. This is where you can work alongside a dedicated cloud consultancy service, to effectively safeguard your data – they’ll regularly monitor for threats, identify potential infrastructure vulnerabilities, and implement robust and compliant security processes.
DevOps
Having a DevOps professional as part of your cloud consultancy team is essential if you’re looking for ways to take your business to the next level and improve software deployment – by identifying hinderances within your current development infrastructure, they’ll improve digital agility, streamline costs, and, perhaps most importantly, deliver improved frontend experiences.
What are the benefits of cloud consultancy?
When operating within the cloud, it’s helpful to have expert involvement to ensure you’re making the most of your environment. For example, some of the key benefits of cloud consultancy services include:
- Cloud integration: A consultant will seamlessly move your current applications and data to a cloud environment, without silos or bottlenecks. But that’s not all; they’ll also identify opportunities to modernise your current applications or replace them with cloud native solutions.
- Scalability: The cloud is inherently equipped to facilitate scalability, but a consultant can strategically leverage the public or private platform to maximise efficiency and ensure you’re not over- or under-resourcing. Alongside this, they’ll consider projected growth, and proactively plan for changing demands.
- Data security: An experienced cloud consultant will regularly monitor for data security threats, to keep your cloud environment safe and compliant. They’ll be proactive in their activity, putting processes in place to prevent risk before occurance.
- Streamline collaboration: Collaboration comes naturally when you operate within a cloud environment, but only If you’ve established processes that facilitate communication, management, and seamless workflows – all of which can be advised by a cloud expert.
- Business continuity: Downtime can be disastrous for any business, so it’s useful to have a cloud consultant who can minimise the impact and design an effective continuity plan in the case of disruption. And as the cloud environment changes, they’ll continually test and refine the continuity plan to improve recovery speed and reduce data loss.
How to choose a cloud consultant
If you’re interested in employing the services of an experienced cloud consultant, it’s important to consider a few key factors:
- Can they tailor cloud solutions to your business requirements?
- Have they demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the cloud and its benefits?
- Is their communication clear, and do they effectively explain cloud solutions?
- Can they offer service support at each stage of your cloud journey?
If your chosen cloud consultancy company can answer yes to each of the above questions, they’re ready to join your business and make a real impact! Get in touch with our team of industry-leading and accredited consultants to find out more about how we can help or discover even more from our experts over on the cloud blog.
