Cloud Advisory

Organisations are adopting cloud services at an unprecedented rate. Such services offer a number of benefits and opportunities, as well as a number of risks. Understanding such risks is vital to mitigate against these and ensure maximum return on investment.

Scalable, resilient solutions

The widespread adoption of cloud services showcases the preference for scalable, resilient and low maintenance solutions that allow employees to work anywhere and collaborate with almost anyone. These benefits, in conjunction with the shift away from capital expenditure to operational expenditure, provide significant opportunity for businesses to reassess their technology operating model, however this must also be assessed against the following risks:

Information privacy and security - outsourcing your technology to the cloud does not mean you devolve your privacy and security responsibilities.
Loss of control, oversight, audit and enforcement capability – your organisation will almost certainly lose some visibility of key controls and the ability to exercise oversight and audit when working with a cloud service provider.
Reliance on service level agreements – as with any outsource arrangement, you will likely lose some of the flexibility of an in-house service. It is therefore essential that service level agreements not only stipulate the appropriate services, but also the level of access to the provider that will be required.
Cloud vendor lock-in – not all cloud services are created equal, with some being very bespoke in nature. Before entering into a new relationship, it is necessary to consider the ability to exit or migrate to another provider.
Cloud vendor lock-out – ensuring the ongoing viability of an organisation is an important consideration of any partnership arrangement as service or information unavailability would cause significant disruption.
Multi-tenant environments – whichever cloud service provider you choose, it is likely that your information will be held in a multi-tenant environment. Understanding how your information is physically and logically separated is an important consideration.

We apply this understanding to create value at every turn and address the key issues and risks to help our clients in successfully adopting and managing cloud with the agreed and desired level of protection. In order to achieve this we offer the following services:

1. Cloud Strategy Support