AAC’s cloud experience help customers realize the wide range benefits including simplified IT management, enhanced efficiency and significant cost reduction.  Our services take into account customers business processes, workflows and institutional knowledge and confidently overcome the struggles of complexity, reliability, and security associated with the cloud adoption.  Free your IT talent from the mundane challenges of yesterday from managing static IT infrastructure and drive innovation with an environment that is no longer constrained by cost or resources.  Working with one of the earliest adopting agencies to complete a cloud migration, AAC provides valuable insight into successful practices, risks and mitigation strategies, and lessons learned.  

Some of these are:

• Set clear goals and targets—senior leaders must set goals that can make the organization face reality.
• Exercise strong leadership from the top down—there must be an established and unambiguous course for change that support business goals and have identified straightforward milestones.
• Create the necessary processes and structures to achieve both a technical and business transformation—with clear accountability.
• Maintain energy and involvement throughout the organization for the duration of the transition process—senior leaders must communicate with and engage the organization as a whole.
• Understand the benefits of and the difference between cloud models.—Different cloud service models such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) have different approaches to procuring, managing, pricing, and securing each of them. Including public, private, and hybrid clouds.

Migration

Let AAC decrease your cloud deployment time and ensure that customers deliver operational continuity throughout the transition.  Our SUCCESSFUL migration experience has garnered a set of mature processes, proven methods, skilled, knowledgeable personnel in complex migration projects, and the following guiding principles:

• Strictly and diligently, apply security, environmental sustainability, and fiscal controls in compliance with the customer’s internal guidelines, policies, and procedures.
• Follow the customer’s IT governance and project management standards while effectively coordinating the migration process with internal and external agency stakeholders.
• Redesign and redeploy systems to reduce energy usage and operational costs, while increasing system capacity and redundancy to satisfy demand and business continuity needs.
• Maintain multiple operational environments during the transition, while supporting required availability, performance, security, and change management policies for all production systems.
• Apply proven change integration methods to achieve both early adoption and sustainable outcomes.

Operations

Successfully managing the interdependencies among organizational, process and technology-related risks is essential for continued mission support.  Equally important is a rigorous yet flexible configuration management processes to support DevOps and Agile methodologies.  

• Understand that ITIL’s continuous monitoring mandate equally applies in a cloud environment
• Be aware that back-up and recovery of agency data is the agency’s responsibility
• Monitor costs through contract end of life and be aware of potential exit penalties
• Develop a continuous integration model