Accelerating your cloud transformation journey

A critical underlying requirement for offering a scalable, flexible, cost-effective, and digital experience is having an IT platform that can adhere to the peaks and drops in consumer requests. A platform that scales up when your customers rush to buy your services / products online and scales down when demand is low. In the past decade, this request for scalability and flexibility is answered by several hyperscalers (like Amazon, Microsoft, Google) through their cloud service offerings.

At Schuberg Philis, we understand how our customers can benefit from the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. In the past years, we have been part of many enterprise cloud transformation programs (for example - in 2020 alone - we initiated the journey to the cloud with 8 of our customers). In these journeys, we recognize three critical phases:

1. Explore
2. Scale
3. Exploit and Leverage

For each of the phases we bring proven methods and codified building blocks to accelerate your transformation. A description of each phase, the key activities, and our added value in these programs is given below.

1. Explore

• Plan backwards — how will the cloud bring business value after the transformation?
• Identify a small, but strategic service that can be migrated end-to-end
• Proof of Value (PoV) this strategic service with a focus on realizing business value
• Define a high-level business case, focus both on cost savings and on accelerated business value creation
• Involve Innovators & Early adopters to gain enthusiasm and start the journey
• Initiate the organizational communication on how this program brings added value to the company

Doing the above will decrease the likelihood of ending in analysis-paralysis, long-term High-Level & Low-Level Design sessions without execution and provides tangible results to convince skeptical people in your organization.
Our unique positioning: We bring the experts that can generate the initial plan, execute the PoVs, show the value and energize the business to step in on this journey.

2. Scale

• Embrace the complexity, leverage proven concepts to create a platform in AWS (within Schuberg Philis, we refer to that platform as a Landing Zone) that can host all your business-critical apps
• Relentless focus on security, compliance, and Finance. Ensure Security, Compliancy and Finance representatives are part of your program and also understand the value (and risks) of the migration
• Automate, automate, automate. Scaling (especially in multi-country, multi-services organizations) can only be done if the complexity of foundational services (like networking, IAM, keys & secret management, back-ups, and also to a large extent compliance and security) are automated away for each DevOps team
• Bring in cloud DevSecOps experts to engineer a platform in the public cloud that fulfils the requirements of your business
• Open the floor to other strategic initiatives, involve the Early Majority and re-initiate a communication plan tailored to their needs and concerns
• Champion technical acumen, make sure your most capable people engage on a new career path, reshuffle hierarchy, or add a technical layer of hierarchy

Our unique positioning: Schuberg Philis has embedded years of engineering into a codified building block library with many Landing Zone components. Critical platform components like Identity & Access Management, networking and Cloud Cost Management can be largely implemented off-the-shelf, saving months of engineering and coding in your cloud transformation journey.

3. Exploit and leverage

• Measure the impact of the cloud transformation, not only on cost savings, and efficiencies but also on business velocity and ability to anticipate changing customer preferences / behavior
• Implement continuous improvement methods supported by Objective Key Results (OKRs). For example: ‘Increase customer engagement score by XX in month Y.’
• Onboard new initiatives, services, and functionality
• Re-prioritize your original back-ward planned value proposition, identify new value streams
• Organize roadshows for the Late Majority & Laggards in your organization to further increase the cloud adoption and business value of the transformation
• Hire talent that can translate the new possibilities into digital business services

Our unique positioning: We are mission-critical and business value oriented. We thrive when we bring our customers onto the forefront of cloud innovation. We define & implement use cases with our customers on Artificial Intelligence, smart industries and (big) data.

Curious to hear more? Please connect with:

Julian Hessels (jhessels@schubergphilis.com)
Stefan Holdermans (sholdermans@schubergphilis.com)
Max van Dongen (mvandongen@schubergphilis.com)