Cloud Enablement Strategy & Azure Adoption Acceleration

Trility previously helped create a strategic roadmap for this client. For this engagement, Trility was hired to help define and design a Cloud Enablement Strategy that covered critical areas for initial adoption: identity and access management (IAM), compute, networking, data storage, cost controls, security, and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery capabilities (BC/DR). 

The team identified challenges to address for a successful Azure adoption:

• An existing non-enterprise agreement led to delays in provisioning and resource availability 

• Lack of standards for data or cloud services 

• Cloud was mostly used for disaster recovery for on-prem

• Authorization performed with keys

• Existing team members needed training for future-state skills

• Hiring new team members for future-state roles

The Trility team worked closely with leadership and stakeholders to assess existing solutions and define requirements for new systems. The team conducted architectural assessments to document existing processes, procedures, and information security implementations and provide next-step recommendations for a Cloud Enablement Strategy. Recommendations included guidance for infrastructure, data systems, and application development patterns for optimal Azure utilization.

Key areas in the solution included:

• Understand Azure resources being deployed and configured in a secure, cost-effective manner that is monitored

• Knowledge transfer to the client’s team to manage this predictable, repeatable deployment pattern and increase proficiency in cloud services with a sandbox environment

• Automate manual work queues

• Utilize serverless, auto-scaling, and right-sizing performance tiers to minimize costs

• Empower application teams to monitor and troubleshoot cloud environments

• Use role-based access control

Trility delivered an Azure Cloud & Enablement Plan to accelerate adoption for the client's team members to evolve and maintain. The client was positioned to deploy applications and services in Azure using modern software best practices, as well as a data lake and data analytics solution.

Designed Azure Roadmap to automate provisioning to resources (eliminating 8-12 hours of setup and troubleshooting per app/service) and decommissioning. Initial environments were stood up with the following attributes:

• Address security by leveraging a least-privilege implementation

• Enterprise patterns for groups, policies, roles, and subscriptions

• Centralized log analytics repository and monitoring and alerting

• Enforce policies through code

• Control and approval of resource providers

• Terraform state management 

• Azure private network to restrict public access and require VPN access to network

• Cost management roles for transparent cost management in the Azure portal