Cloud consultancy

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

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.

The five steps to the cloud

We’ll help you through the five steps to the cloud:

• Strategy – understanding your vision and setting objectives
• Discovery – looking at stakeholders, technologies and operating costs
• Approach – conducting a SWOT analysis
• Plan - designing your specific project plan
• Implement – building, migrating, testing and reviewing your plan

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Find out more

To find out more about this or our other consultancy services, contact your account manager.