Cloud Solutions

Cloud Solutions- A place for everything …

Using proven methodologies and drawing on decades of experience, Northdoor helps organisations determine the right platform for every workload. In some cases – for example, where security and latency are critical factors – that may be a private cloud in your own data centre. For some workloads, migrating to bare-metal servers (IaaS) or a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment on a hyperscaler cloud such as Microsoft Azure may be the best option. And where appropriate, you may choose to replace some applications with full software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions in the public cloud.

With long experience, preferred partner status and technical certifications for major public cloud providers, Northdoor can help you choose the right SaaS, PaaS or IaaS environment for your business needs. We also offer comprehensive managed services, enabling businesses to completely remove the administrative overhead of running a public cloud landscape. And when you want to keep workloads running safely inside your own firewall, we can help you modernise your on-premises infrastructure to provide the flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency of a private cloud.

To start the ball rolling, download our Cloud Readiness Assessment presentation

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… and everything in its place

For most enterprises, running every system in the cloud is not viable: for reasons of security, latency or regulatory compliance, it is usually necessary to keep some IT infrastructure in-house. Northdoor offers structured readiness assessments for each workload to help enterprises determine which will benefit from migration to the cloud and which may need to remain on-premises. These assessments include projections of TCO benefits and any potential risk in migration – whether to a new platform in the cloud or a modernised platform in the existing data centre.

The goal is always to help you move your business-critical systems to platforms that require less maintenance and offer more sustainability. For example, moving to the latest version of a third-party software package running on modern hardware can significantly reduce your ongoing costs. Alternatively, choosing a platform-as-a-service offering will eliminate the time and effort associated with patching, while a full infrastructure-as-a-service offering means no more concerns about owning and operating hardware.

Northdoor offers a rigorous methodology and proprietary tools to help you define your existing hardware and software assets and the flows of business information between them. We can then help you map these components to an equivalent platform in the cloud, perform a low-risk and non-disruptive migration, and support you as required on an ongoing basis.

Selecting – and connecting – the right cloud partners

Enterprises can choose from an enormous variety of public cloud services, and it can be hard to understand the pros and cons of each. Northdoor offers structured assessments to help companies analyse their existing capabilities, plot future requirements and map these to the appropriate resources in the cloud. This may be a case of simply replicating the existing architecture as closely as possible, but clients typically engage us to optimise systems as part of the migration process.

Northdoor can help you analyse your existing on-premises landscape and design a more compact architecture on the cloud. As well as minimising the size and cost of the stack you need on the cloud, simplification of your existing landscape will increase its portability.

With many companies today already using some elements of cloud-based infrastructure, one of Northdoor’s key objectives is to ensure reliable and secure network connections between on-premises and cloud resources. We can configure and manage dedicated, high-throughput connections to major public cloud providers, helping you to get the benefits of a hybrid architecture without compromise.

Northdoor can also help you configure a multi-site backup and recovery regime, combining technical know-how with an understanding of the relative importance of systems. We can also show you how a hybrid cloud environment can dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of enterprise-class disaster recovery. This can include zero-risk DR tests to give you peace of mind at any time that your most critical assets are protected.

FinOps: controlling cloud costs

The ease and speed of firing up new services in the cloud can lead to spiralling costs. Using cutting-edge FinOps practices, Northdoor can monitor your ongoing use of public-cloud resources and the relevant charging mechanisms to ensure ongoing cost efficiency. In doing so, we help you keep the cost of cloud services aligned with the business value delivered by those services.

Our fully managed cloud services also help organisations control costs, taking on as much or as little of the management burden as required, from remote support through to full outsourcing of enterprise systems. Northdoor consultants can take the strain off your internal team, covering niche skills that you lack the time or motivation to invest in. We can also augment your existing in-house capabilities, providing additional capacity as well as cover for leave or sickness.

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