2. Six Steps to Cloud Welcome. It can be hard to trust a company
you’ve never worked with before – perhaps
never even heard of. That’s why we’ve laid out
a programme known as “Six Steps to Cloud”
to help us get to know one another and
determine if we’re a good fit for each other
when it comes to cloud services.
1
Choose
your moment
The first step on your journey should
be a conversation with one of
Richardson Eyres’ transformation
consultants to decide if now is the
right time for you to make the move
to the cloud.
Richardson Eyres have 28 years’
experience translating business ambitions
into infrastructure and application
solutions. Moving to an infrastructure or
application service is no different.
This free consultation might well be the
best 90 minutes you spend assessing
the merits of cloud. Consider the
following as possible trigger events
for this initial conversation:
a. Are you coming to the end of a
managed service or hosting
contract?
b. Are you about to undertake an
infrastructure refresh or application
project?
c. Do you need online disaster
recovery?
d. Does your backup system require
an overhaul?
e. Are you moving from XP to
Windows 7?
f. Is your company growing by
acquisition?
g. Do you need temporary capacity
for a project or test platform?
h. Are you budget constrained?
2
Decide where
to start
Before any move, it makes sense to
take stock. You’ll no doubt know
where your key challenges lie, but few
customers can categorically define
what they have and how it would
translate to a cloud service.
Richardson Eyres have been assessing
data centres and IT infrastructure ahead
of migration, upgrades and wholesale
consolidation for decades. We have a
wide range of tools available and some
of the highest qualified infrastructure
consultants at hand to assess your
estate. Capacity, throughput, utilisation,
profiles of hosts and users – many
metrics can be examined which enable
us to determine the current health and
scale of your infrastructure and whether
cloud services are a good fit.
3
Be clear on the
benefit to users
So, you have Richardson Eyres
assessments to hand. You may have
even been given a ball-park estimate
of costs. It looks interesting, but you
know it’s not going to fly if the user
experience is compromised. They
will call you if the service is not
performing as expected. And then
you’ll call us. Neither of us wants that.
We have an absolute commitment to
quality, to you as a customer and to
ourselves, and will not provide a service
unless we are fully confident it is fit for
purpose. So, how do we ensure it’s a
good fit?
Virtualisation was the key enabler for
consolidation and centralisation of IT
service delivery. At first, many customers
needed convincing that virtual machines
would deliver the same performance as
physical. Then there was the common
concern of: ‘All my eggs in one basket’.
Some larger scale projects involved
geographic consolidation of data
centres too – which brought the added
consideration of: ‘Will it work across
the WAN?’
The qualification principles adopted
during virtualisation projects are similar
to those of cloud. And in this regard
Richardson Eyres experience is peerless.
We were one of the first VMware
consulting partners in the UK – no
company has more experience of IT
infrastructure transformation of this type.
We’ve worked with hundreds of
organisations and application providers
effectively proving that our whiteboard
designs and feasibility reports translate
in practice. It’s all part of the service,
and in this way we take as much of the
risk out of the decision to move to the
cloud as possible.
3. Richardson Eyres provide infrastructure, applications, desktops, disaster recovery and backup in the cloud. Our existing customers
will vouch for the strength of our offerings and service capabilities. Other providers would say the same of their customers no
doubt, but the key difference between Richardson Eyres’ approach and other cloud vendors is our commitment to pre-contract
qualification and due diligence.
Customers speak as highly about the support they get on their journey to RE Cloud as they do about their experience of the various
platform services they use. That’s support in all senses of the word – advice, care, attention, assistance – underpinned by a
programme of work aimed at taking joint responsibility for the decision to place some or all of your platform services in our hands.
Summarised in Six Steps, we believe it is the most diligent and comprehensive approach to migrating to the cloud available in the
market today.
4
Test it
If talk is cheap and our written
commitments still leave you
unconvinced, trial it. There’s really no
better way of knowing it will work than
seeing it in action.
At Richardson Eyres we are very happy
to run proof of concepts and regularly
provide virtual data centre trials, desktop
as a service accounts, even proof of
concept onsite-to-offsite backups. We
want you to be thoroughly comfortable
that you’re doing the right thing, and
sometimes only seeing is believing.
5
Present the
business case
Even when you know it will work and
you know what it will cost, the business
might still need some convincing.
We have written a separate piece
around establishing the true costs of IT
service provision, balanced against the
costs and both hard and soft benefits
of acquiring a cloud service. As with
other aspects of qualification and due
diligence, Richardson Eyres are at hand
to assist.
6
Make it happen!
You’ve convinced yourself and the
business and committed to the service.
So how do you make the best laid plans
become a reality?
At this point some customers are happy
to take it from there, utilising our intuitive
tools and portals to establish an IT
presence in the cloud themselves. Others
would prefer we maintain a guiding
hand, and in some cases we undertake
the deployment wholesale. The point is:
we’re here to support you in your aims
and will be thoroughly responsible in our
approach.
Some say the journey is more important
than the destination. We think they are
equally important, and we know you’re
more likely to enjoy the destination a
whole lot more if it delivers as promised.
And that’s why we take this approach.
4. “Who is this Guy?”
About the author
Guy Longmore began working in technology back in 1997, at the
advent of Storage Area Networks. Always one to seek out something
new, he joined a nascent SAN vendor with plans to become the next
EMC. They never quite realised their ambitions, but Guy learned a
thing or two about helping to make a market and establish a value
proposition at the early stages of adoption.
From there he went to Compaq, leading their enterprise storage
ambitions in The City. He quickly established a name for himself with
breakthrough wins and was handpicked to present his customer case
studies to the EMEA Sales Conference in New York from the grand
setting of a Broadway stage. A stint in Compaq/HP’s New Economy
team followed, heading up their storage push into joint ventures,
emerging ISPs and the darlings of Internet 1.0.
When the bubble burst, Guy reassessed his ambitions and decided to
become a journalist. Work at Computing Magazine was an obvious
start after college but with a short adventure novel under his belt he
fancied something more exotic and ended up in China, working as
Staff Editor on the nation’s only English-language travel magazine.
When it closed he decided to return, both to England and a new
role in IT with Richardson Eyres; Guy’s key technology partner from
his days at Compaq and HP. He quickly leveraged his experience in
storage, working on Richardson Eyres’ infrastructure consolidation
projects. Always seeking something new and fresh he then set about
creating a suite of managed services for on-premise infrastructure.
Guy now successfully heads up the company’s Cloud and Managed
Services division.
re-cloud.net
Contact Us:
recloud@richardsoneyres.co.uk
01494 792 002
