ONline Hosting
Cloud Services
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or "Cloud" resources (e.g. Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) provide a powerful and efficient platform for hosting applications, data, and workloads, and can be an excellent alternative to on-premise deployment models.
Overview
“Cloud Brokering”
A concept that we’ve found to be of benefit to our customers is that of "Cloud Broker": An entity that manages the use, performance, and delivery of cloud resources/services and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers.
This entity provides a single point for management of resources from multiple cloud providers, and is usually composed of leadership from the customer organization, along with technical subject-matter experts (e.g. cloud architects) from RISA.
Cloud interoperability: Flexibility in utilizing multiple cloud service providers
Cloud portability: Operations can scale as organizational demand increases
Service migration: Cloud services are transferrable between providers
Business continuity: Security and availability for your important data
Cost savings: "Brokering" allows for signigicant cost savings
How does it work?
Effective navigation of these monolithic platforms requires specific expertise and experience to avoid potential pitfalls and make the transition from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud as uncomplicated as possible. This experience and expertise is one of RISA's strengths.
Our management of the cloud infrastructure includes continuous (and potentially automated) monitoring of cloud resources. This ensures continual operation, allows for optimization of cloud resources, and includes Tiered Help Desk services to triage issues that arise with the cloud infrastructure.
Management
Our certified cloud engineers and architects will work with your management and staff to design a cloud architecture that is customized for your organization's service requirements to provide the resources to host your current service infrastructure.
IT Staff
RISA personnel will then work with your IT staff and leadership to develop a plan for a phased migration of current applications, services, and data from on-premise environment to the cloud architecture.
Integrated Team
Then, they will work with your staff as an integrated team to complete that migration, making adjustments to the migration plan to resolve any issues that may arise.
Cloud Engineers
Once the migration is complete, our cloud support personnel (e.g. cloud practitioners and cloud engineers) manage the cloud infrastructure, allowing your IT staff to focus on the services, applications, and data that are crucial for the operation of your organization.
USSOCOM
Case Study
In our most recent cloud management experience, we provided cloud engineering and architect support services to the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in their efforts to migrate some of their public-facing resources to AWS' GovCloud infrastructure.
We inherited a prior design for the proposed cloud infrastructure, which our AWS architect personnel optimized. Our architect then worked with government and contractor personnel in USSOCOM's Operations directorate to complete the migration to the GovCloud infrastructure.
Our AWS engineering personnel are now working with USSOCOM's Operations to ensure the continued operation and optimization of those public-facing resources. In addition, some of our cloud support professionals are now assisting the command with migrating additional services to the cloud as well as establishing a Cloud Broker entity.