Taking a Truly Consultative Approach with AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud platform of choice for companies of all shapes and sizes – ranging from smaller tech startups to large enterprises, and the behemoths of the corporate world. What makes AWS such a compelling proposition for all business types is its security capabilities, global reach, ability to scale, and general breadth of services which cater to the evolving needs of its customer base.

But navigating your way through the hundreds of services and options available on the AWS Cloud Platform can, at times, be overwhelming.

At Rackspace we know that a range of skills and expertise is needed to successfully identify, migrate and then manage workloads to AWS Cloud. Keeping your feet on the ground and your business is in the cloud can be made more difficult without the right partner by your side.

As a Premier AWS Consulting Partner, we have technical expertise on the ground – thousands of AWS technical certifications – and experience managing the workloads of thousands of customers across every vertical.

The importance of asking the right questions, at the right time

I believe that what’s critical to any successful cloud migration is to first understand the motivators behind our customers’ decision to make the move. This may be to generate greater cost efficiencies, increase resilience or agility, offer faster time to market, or to aid in global expansion. The choice of solution and services we recommend ultimately depends on the business objectives behind the move to cloud.

From our experience, the first step of our discovery process is for a team of trained consultants to conduct an onboarding process with each customer to better understand their journey to AWS and identify the workloads that are a good candidate for migration. Typically, these are applications that can benefit from the agility and the scale that AWS offers.

Cloud Suitability Assessments help to identify the various requirements and dependencies for different workloads, including compliance regulation, licensing, latency and performance issues, which helps us to determine which applications can (and should) be moved to cloud.

Staying at the forefront

AWS as a mature, secure cloud service platform already offers database storage, content delivery, and other functionalities, AWS has been at the forefront of cloud technologies since it was first introduced to market in 2006.

Its cloud offerings are the basic building blocks of any application and service which enables leading businesses to create next-generation applications: container services, artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), Serverless (Lambda) and more. AWS is a one-stop flexible platform capable of meeting all of your cloud service’s needs.

Creating a bespoke AWS solution

It’s no surprise that many organisations find the prospect of moving to cloud daunting and encounter difficulties when choosing what is appropriate for their unique business challenges and needs. AWS offers an array of services to build out cloud applications and cater to the various business use cases that an organisation may have. For instance, organisations just starting out in their cloud journey may require a lift and shift approach to cloud, to begin with, later redesigning and architecting their applications once they become familiar with the features available in cloud.

An experienced partner like Rackspace can help Australian organisations make sense of everything AWS has to offer and make the choices best suited to each stage of their cloud migration. This level of expertise offers businesses the flexibility, scalability, and reliability needed to remain competitive in today’s increasingly complex tech landscape, making the shift to cloud that much less ‘turbulent’.

Ultimately, taking a consultative approach is centred on understanding the unique needs of each customer and adjusting recommendations in line with specific requirements. And in my experience process is the cornerstone of a great partnership and is made easy given the wide range of features on AWS.