It is very likely that your company has experimented with the cloud. Maybe you have moved the website of the company to a service-based on-demand cloud infrastructure. It is possible that developers are testing new applications in the cloud before publishing them. Chances are your fellow online business subscribe to several Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, whether IT has participated in the decision or not.

However, no company has succeeded experiencing without a proper roadmap. To maximize investment and the value achieved in managed services and cloud solutions, all businesses whether large or small, should start with a road map. Each company must make their own decisions where and how cloud solutions are needed to be adapted to meet your needs.

What a roadmap will do is to ensure that each of the actions on the cloud that the company takes to respond to current needs remain valid in the future. But where do you start? The development of a roadmap for managed services strategy has to be overwhelming and involves a bit of planning, duties and collaboration.

Why Custom Services?

The custom managed service is a flexible business model. Its general features speak of a broad set of business challenges, and specific cloud services offered by different providers can vary widely in their ability to meet the needs of a company. Companies can go to the custom cloud services to achieve some (or all) of the following advantages:

• Deferral of capital investment: When budgets are tight, many companies prefer to spend the same operating budget rather than commit a capital investment in hardware with a long payback.
• Faster time to market: The cloud applications can be deployed in a few minutes, hours or days instead of weeks or months earlier, allowing the companies to respond more quickly to changes occurring in the market.
• Application Scalability: The cloud solutions adapt to fluctuations in use without performance degradation, so the company does not have to redesign systems for use in working tips.
• Improved quality and consistency: Applications that are created, tested and implanted into solid managed services and cloud platforms have fewer errors because developers are working with proven templates and can easily replicate the production environment.
• Resilience: Many companies choose cloud solutions to support their business continuity plans and disaster recovery, ensuring compliance and best practices for data availability.

Each type of services either public or private, on-site or hosted Infrastructure response to different needs. Therefore, there is a unique approach to custom solutions that is best for all companies. It is also the cause why it is so important for each company to develop its own strategy for cloud.

5 Steps to Build a Road Map

Below are guidelines that help companies create a roadmap:

• Communicate: The adoption of managed services and cloud benefits the entire company, not just the IT department but all important aspect of businesses. Communicate your plans early with senior management and your fellow business line, emphasizing on the advantages of them. Talk to the senior management team on how a corporate IT strategy based on the cloud can encourage innovation and increase market responsiveness while reducing investment in capital. With business line managers, show how the cloud can streamline your application requests through IT, reduce time-out to market and improve collaboration. Report on the cloud can benefit your project in two ways. First, it may compel in the budget priorities that need to support the project; And in second place, ensure the cooperation of the business line managers when considered the applications that need to move to the cloud.
• Create an inventory of your workloads: Try and not move everything to the cloud, at least in the foreseeable future. But you need to think about which workloads should be migrated and when. And you need to start with an inventory. This can be a big task or small tasks depending on what you choose. Obviously, the department already has the list of current applications it manages, but you can expand the inventory to include workloads that are not currently automated or are partially automated such as business analytics functions carried out promptly using spreadsheets in a functional department. By capturing these workloads, IT occupies a better position to make decisions regarding all the extent of cloud options, including the integration of software functionality. When making the inventory, pay particular attention to traditional applications that have become cumbersome or showing poor performance. They may be candidates for a complete redesign that may include redo for optimum performance in the cloud.
• Evaluate workloads: The suitability of custom services is a function of several subjective and objective criteria, including security, availability, and accessibility how applications interact with other workloads. A good starting point is to assess how critical and how strategic is the workload for the company.
• Assigning workloads to cloud services and initiate migration: A flexible model of cloud solution offers many environments, cost counterparts, performance, and functionality. The hosted private clouds provide a high degree of security and performance monitoring. A hybrid cloud may be the best choice for workloads that feed on various sources, including the private cloud in their own With a variety of solutions on the market, choose a trusted and expertise provider with the broadest portfolio, flexible and service-level agreement performance that meet your needs.
• Manage the cloud: Make sure the vendor offers a robust set of management tools that allow you to optimize the cloud. Make sure you know how you are using the cloud. Periodically check usage reports either to bill departments or simply to ensure efficiency. Choose a managed service provider that offers management tools to be utilized in the traditional IT environment, or by supporting standards that enable tools to access your current console. That way you can manage the entire environment coherently and streamlining administrative functions and maximizing value for the company.

Select MadeIT As Your Trusted Partner

For businesses that have limited resources or skill to the roadmap, the smart alternative is to choose an expert provider with whom they assist in the early stages of the roadmap. Thus, the partner can help you understand your options, evaluate your workloads and managing migration. For you to develop your strategy, the provider must have a broad knowledge of adoption patterns of clouds and share best practices. What’s more, the provider must provide a comprehensive set of offers that fit your roadmap.

For many companies, MadeIT and its vast network of certified partners are the choice for the cloud to help them start their journey to the managed services. Leveraging decades of experience in managing corporate data centers, MadeIT can provide professional services to help you create a cloud strategy, evaluate workloads, assess resilience plans and security risk, migrate to the cloud and even provide the back monitoring and management of cloud services. MadeIT can also help optimize your center data in its own facilities, virtualization products and services, and private cloud that are integrated into the new cloud environment.

You can choose from a range of private, scalable and secure cloud to maximize profitability without compromising safety and availability. Increase investment in the data center on site, by creating a hybrid cloud that optimizes resources, offering scalability and flexibility.