Cloud consultancy
A bespoke consultancy service – helping you use the cloud to achieve wider digital goals.
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In research and education, cloud technologies are a key enabler for digital change – making it easier and more flexible to manage a range of digital projects, from essential business services to data analytics to high-performance computing.
But integrating the cloud into your vision can bring a wide range of strategic and practical challenges – from making the business case to managing security concerns to designing an effective cloud migration.
To help you solve your specific challenges, we offer a bespoke cloud consultancy service, helping make you better equipped to use the cloud to meet your digital goals.
Our certified cloud experts offer tailored advice and support, specifically targeted to your needs, and grounded in our experience as a not-for-profit organisation serving the research and education sector.
How our consultancy service benefits you
This service is designed to help you:
Make cloud part of your wider digital vision
To help you transform and meet wider goals, we help you define your cloud strategy and create roadmaps to put that strategy into practice.
Of course, this isn’t something IT can do alone. So we offer workshops for key stakeholders – helping people in the wider organisation understand how cloud technologies help achieve their objectives.
Become more agile
A key benefit of the cloud is the chance to become more agile as an organisation – managing smaller projects in a more flexible way.
We can help you plan for the effect of this cultural change, designing workflows to fit your cloud-first vision.
Select the right platforms
Choosing the right platforms and vendors is a key part of implementing any cloud strategy.
At Jisc, we offer vendor-agnostic purchasing frameworks to help you find the best partners to meet your goals; and we work together with platforms and suppliers on specific solutions, creating an ecosystem of partners from which to choose.
Make the financial case for the cloud
Cloud solutions offer the chance to reduce capital expenditure and the associated business risk, but it requires planning to realise the benefits.
To help you understand the full costs and benefits to you, we recommend a financial assessment such as our financial X-ray as part of your consultancy service.
Solve practical, technical challenges
We can offer consultancy on a wide range of specific technical challenges, including:
- Designing a cloud-first architecture
- Assessing your readiness for cloud migration
- Developing roadmaps and timetables for cloud migration, depending on your current readiness
- Helping to implement a wide range of cloud projects
Develop your in-house skills
In IT and service delivery teams, it’s important to develop the in-house capability to manage cloud resources going forward.
So we work with leading vendors and providers to help you offer continuing professional development. These services may include:
- Training and seminars, online and in person
- Skills transfer during cloud adoption and migration projects
Stay secure
We offer security-focused reviews:
- Cloud security review - By auditing cloud platforms, we can determine if platforms have been deployed in line with platform vendor best practice and CIS benchmarking. This is a service which can run alongside penetration tests.
- Microsoft 365 security review - For Microsoft 365, we offer advice and guidance as a trusted partner, to ensure your Microsoft Office 365 tenant adheres to Microsoft’s best practice and principles.
How the service works
Jisc cloud consultancy is a bespoke service. After an initial, free-of-charge meeting to understand your needs – either face-to-face or as a call – we will write a proposal with defined deliverables for you to approve.
When we provide strategic consultancy, this will take the form of workshop days followed by a report with recommendations. We can design other forms of consultancy on a bespoke basis.
Six key steps to the cloud
Our step-by-step guide to making your cloud vision a reality (pdf) shows you how the key steps works in practice and how our consultancy team can help you. These steps are:
- Strategy – understanding your vision and setting objectives
- Discovery – looking at stakeholders, technologies and operating costs
- Approach – creating a roadmap to the cloud
- Plan - designing your specific project plan
- Implement – building, deploying, testing and reviewing your plan
- Optimise - identifying new areas for innovation
Further information
For a more in depth look at moving to the cloud and what each step could involve, see the cloud strategies and roadmaps presentation.
Cloud retained expertise
If you're taking on new responsibilities, or your organisation has embarked on significant changes to develop a cloud strategy or plan your infrastructure, you may need an expert friend and mentor to help you achieve your project goals.
Retained cloud expertise is a pre-paid purchase of cloud consultancy, professional services and engineering resources, which can be called off within a 12-month time frame.
How we can help
- Support you to ask the right questions and explain the complexities
- Enable you to sharpen up your project plans and manage changes
- Allow you to keep ownership of your project and develop skills and abilities to take you to the next stage in your organisation
- Support your projects - moving to the cloud, or further adopting cloud technologies to achieve your operational goals
Find out more
To find out more about this or our other consultancy services, contact your account manager.
ISO certification
This service is included within the scope of our ISO9001 and ISO27001 certificates.
