Your cloud needs more than a landing zone – it deserves an enablement platform

Daan Stakenburg small 0402
Daan Stakenburg
mei 25, 2022 · 4 min lezen Engels
Landing zone small

Without an enablement platform, IT migrations would be like trying to land a plane in an overgrown forest on the side of a mountain during a blizzard. But with one, the experience is more like touching down with grace and precision on a newly paved runway marked by signs and illumination. Having an office in Schiphol-Rijk, with the Amsterdam airport as our neighbor, we couldn’t help but consider the link between the physical landing zones surrounding us and the digital versions we build for many companies. And we came to realize that although the rest of the industry uses the term “landing zone,” we talk of an enablement platform – a customized configuration for cloud computing that entails a lot more when created by Schuberg Philis.

We offer customers not just a place to land, but to also taxi, transport, and ultimately transform their digital operations in order to better their business. In fact, we envision our enablement platform as a lot more than just a runway – it is the equivalent of a full-service airport.

The power of the control tower

Airports come in different sizes and fulfill different needs, yet no matter what type of aviation traffic they service, all have a control tower. Similarly, our enablement platform can be customized to meet the varying needs of our customers wherever they are on their digital journey. Its core purpose, however, is to serve as a central coordination unit, providing guidance, monitoring, and incident prevention with aggressive automation and as little manual intervention as possible.

By tapping into real-time information through our solutions, which entail dashboarding and detailed logging of important activities, the enablement platform offers power and control. It sets necessary boundaries and provides feedback to IT engineers while allowing application owners to easily access and enrich their own data. Data empowers the operations of our customers. Whether it is their shop floor operators or C-suite executives, employees can then make smart and autonomous decisions within their companies. It’s like captains being able to pilot their own planes while being guided by the information and feedback relayed by the airport control tower.

A key component to control is protecting against vulnerabilities and threats. Our enablement platform plays a major role in contributing to a secure cloud environment by providing guardrails and ensuring that a need-to-know basis access is granted to the teams, applications, and services . Just as airports restrict who and what can exit and enter the premises, in the cloud, we enforce standardized security checks prior to granting access or making changes. We strongly believe in automating as much as possible to avoid manual interactions, which are often error-prone. This becomes relevant especially for granting and revoking access not only between, users, developers, and administrators, but between systems, services, and applications as well.

Good connections for precious goods

Not every flight is direct, so airport services must see to it that passengers and precious goods reach their connections safely and on time. Much like travelers and their carry-ons get directed through security and customs prior to reaching their gate and boarding the plane, users and their requests must be properly processed and accommodated to be executed. The same goes for sensitive data and the applications that carry them, regardless of whether that data is accessed and processed by a fully managed service, a microservice, or a legacy application on a virtualized computer. And sometimes, just as gates need to be adjusted to support more or different types of airplanes, our enablement platform gets altered and/or expanded based on the needs of the application.

Smooth connections are made possible by consistently executed operations. To achieve that level of consistency, we code everything we do in our enablement platform. This ranges from the production of pre-hardened system configurations to the guiderails that every workload needs to adhere to, ensuring a smooth and secure operation. We offer standardized pathways between services, applications, users, developers, and administrators. And we automate the creation of workload areas where applications can be operated from. All these steps let organizations quickly deliver high-performing services regardless of their size and complexity. This, in turn, permits our customers to focus on their core business and clients – that is, to stay connected to them and their needs.

Much like a full-service airport, the cloud is complex, and being able to navigate it is half the battle. In the cloud, clear signage specifically makes all the difference. To ensure customers can find their way and implement a structured cost-management policy in the most efficient manner, our enablement platform implements an automated and pragmatic naming and tagging strategy to support both IT and business needs. Along the way, we also provide expenditure insights for different cost centers.

Highly skilled maintenance crews

Like aviation, cloud computing involves advanced technologies. And like airplanes, cloud applications and services need regular checks, updates, and replacements. Proper preventative maintenance gives airlines the ability to plan ahead – before anything breaks down mid-air – and to keep everyone and everything safe, from gate to gate. Our self-steering multidisciplinary customer teams bear this responsibility too. They are involved in the customer cloud journey from its inception through to maintaining and running the enablement platform and thereafter, helping customers migrate their critical workloads safely and securely.

Last but not least, we offer our customers the opportunity to become as self-sufficient as they want to be. That means they can stay in control of their own cloud journey. Eventually, they may no longer need to rely on us for every new implementation, but rather can sit in their own captain’s seat. At the same time, because we’ve well prepared them and remain on call for support, our customers can count on what we often refer to as a good night’s rest. Sleeping easy comes with knowing that the solutions we provide are secure, compliant, and have a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee.

Indeed, a Schuberg Philis enablement platform provides more than a way to conduct mission-critical business. We enable an all-encompassing digital transformation in which customers can fasten their seat belts, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.