Sourced Group – Providing Consulting Services to Migrate Enterprise Customers to Hyperscale Cloud Providers

The Silicon Review

The cloud has an enhanced role in present technologies, and it is poised to become the future of technology. It will surely exist in almost all industries in a couple of years, there is no doubt about it. Unlike traditional IT hosting services, in the cloud, the businesses go for a third-party provider for software installation, workflows, and other IT services. This enables the users to get remote access to servers and facilitates them to work from anywhere. No wonder cloud consultants have an important role which is fruitful as well. This can go a long way in supporting your business environment and also filling management gaps like the absence of a full-time IT department in your company.

Sourced Group is an award-winning global consulting firm that helps organizations make the most of cloud computing with a focus on security, governance, and compliance. With nearly a decade of experience and offices in Australia, Canada, and Singapore, Sourced provides professional services that secure, migrate, and manage hyper-scale cloud infrastructure for enterprise clients. The company specializes in organization-wide cloud transformation and enablement for highly regulated industries, including financial services, aviation, healthcare, and telecommunications. Its proven deployment frameworks and trusted design patterns enable security-conscious organizations to unlock innovation, increase velocity, and embrace cloud at scale.

Leveraging Cloud at Scale™ Services

Workload Migration: Organizations adopt various pathways to achieve the ultimate goal of cloud transformation programs, that of migrating the majority, if not all, of their application portfolio from on-premise to public cloud. This migration allows businesses to reap the benefits of cloud computing, including increased agility, better resiliency and a stronger culture of innovation across their organization. Based on a decade of experience, Sourced has ascertained that a successful mass migration journey starts with identifying and successfully moving one masthead application workload to the cloud. This allows an organization's Cloud Centre of Excellence to embed the learning into reusable patterns that streamline future migrations.

Cloud Security: A key pillar of every well-architected cloud platform is security. Managing emerging threats and new vulnerabilities present a challenge that all enterprises need to address. At the core of this is automation and good governance, as 95% of security incidents begin with human error. Whether these incidents are intentional, or the result of inadequate training or inefficient procedures does not lessen the adverse impact, be it monetary or reputational, that enterprises would be exposed to. A common trend sees many enterprises trying to address these security challenges by simply extending their data center practices and procedures to cloud environments. This often results in a security posture that does not meet the standards specified in the Information Security Manual (ISM) of the enterprise, leaving cloud platforms underused and hosting non-critical workloads.

Data-driven Transformation: From predicting customer behavior to refining business processes and improving decision making, data is central to digital transformation success. However, finding then leveraging relevant information at scale can be a challenge. Here at  Sourced, they  empower enterprises in highly regulated industries to get more from data. They bring proven cloud and data analytics expertise, and knowledge of the latest data technologies. Data lake houses combine the flexibility, cost-efficiency and scale of data lakes with the structure and management capabilities of data warehouses. The data mesh approach involves modern distributed architectures for analytical data management. They use both to make data more accessible in the cloud.

Governance and Compliance: Ensuring governance and compliance in cloud environments is a primary concern for highly regulated and security-conscious organizations on their cloud adoption journey. However, governance is more than just the legal obligations and regulatory bodies. True organizational governance includes people, processes, and tooling which are then reinforced by cloud policies and controls to ensure that consistent compliance standards are used throughout the cloud environments. Based on a decade of experience deploying Cloud at Scale™ securely within financial services institutions, Sourced applies the principle that there is no single methodology for the implementation of controls. Instead, Sourced consults with its clients to understand their risk posture and fashions strategies for specific risk vectors.

Cloud Centre of Excellence: As an organization's cloud journey begins, a valuable best practice is establishing a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE). Along with the cloud consulting partner, this center of high-performers and forward-thinkers from within the organization can steer cloud efforts throughout the organization, maintain momentum, and advocate for adoption. It can evaluate the workloads that are well-suited to move to the cloud and centralize the cloud strategy, ensuring an agile, iterative and horizontal capability. The CCoE organizationally sits in the Central IT function and operates similarly to an agile product team. Creation of this team occurs before any design or build activities take place, and the team ordinarily consists of a product owner, a scrum master, and several cross-functional DevOps engineers.

The CCoE’s responsibilities begin with designing all foundational elements of the cloud platform, soon progressing to build activities. The team will then continue to incrementally iterate on the platform, adding further features and automating additional components. As applications on-board to the platform, the CCoE provides an operational capability to support the cloud platform and shared services that applications leverage.

The Visionary Leader Upfront

Jonathan Spinks is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sourced Group. He currently spends his time working with enterprise organizations to help them manage the impact of Cloud, Automation and DevOps.