Cloudreach
Delivering the Promise of Cloud

A recent independent study, sponsored by AWS and Cloudreach, has brought to light new data that demonstrates the increasing importance of cloud adoption by enterprises.

More than a quarter (27.5 percent) of US IT leaders believe in the wake of COVID-19, large- scale public cloud migrations are essential for business survival. Furthermore, 66 percent cited COVID-19 and the resulting increase in remote workers as the critical catalyst for cloud migration. As a result, nearly a third (30 percent) said they had accelerated their digital transformation plans in the past ten months. Over half of cios (55 percent) said it had increased their scope of influence across the business, giving them a seat in the boardroom and the opportunity to transform the business digitally.

However, the task of facilitating this transformation is easier said than done considering the myriad options the market has to offer. Most cloud suites are vast ecosystems requiring substantial training and experience to navigate and configure on a routine basis. And most businesses lack the in-house capability and time to deal with the solutions themselves.

To this end, Cloudreach is a multi-cloud transformation services specialist focused on delivering the promise of the cloud for companies around the world. The company was founded in 2009 as a true ‘born in the cloud’ entity to provide specialized cloud services and has grown to become the world’s largest independent multi-cloud services provider with extensive expertise across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Cloudreach CEO, Brooks Borcherding, says:“Cloud reaches end-to-end cloud service offerings are designed to deliver exceptional value for our customers. From cloud strategy, infrastructure design and build, data analytics and insights, application migration and modernization, to full cloud managed services, we bring a unique combination of experience, expertise, software, automation, and a proven delivery methodology to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes.’’

The first generation of cloud adoption began around 2009-2010. The main focus was on migrating servers and applications from static, Capex-driven data centres, to a more agile consumption-based cloud infrastructure. Today’s notions of cloud adoption, however, revolve around advanced cloud-native platforms with capabilities to modernize infrastructure and applications to drive transformative business outcomes. As Borcherding puts it, “companies seek assistance from partners that have the experience and skills to help them maximize the value they’re getting from the cloud. Cloudreach helps its clients accomplish their goals and achieve incredible transformative outcomes, by providing an experienced team of cloud professionals, enabled by best-in-class software, to get the most out of the platform’s capabilities.”

Cloud Expertise and Purpose-built Solutions

Cloudreach helps clients build their cloud platform, migrate and modernize their applications, as well as manage their cloud estate. The company is unique in this pursuit, owing to how it uses software and automation to underpin its services. Cloudreach calls it SMART™ delivery methodology, built by leveraging the intelligence codified over the past 12 years, knitted in with software and automation to create a unique delivery process.The methodology enables Cloudreach to execute migrations better, faster and more efficiently than anyone else.

The SMART™ delivery methodology starts from the company’s advisory services. First, Cloudreach helps clients understand the potential benefits of a cloud transformation and define a blueprint for success including a business case to justify the investment made by the client.

Once the journey is mapped out, Cloudreach underpins it with its unique software and IP, including the market-leading migration planning and assessment software – Cloudamize. This industry-leading software has been adopted broadly throughout the market to perform the upfront assessment of the legacy infrastructure and applications.

Cloudamize has the necessary capabilities as a market-leading planning and assessment tool, as well as API links to help with the bulk migration of applications to the cloud. Using Cloudamize, users can leverage different ways to optimize the cloud platform, the ‘compute’ infrastructure and the licensing. Additionally, Cloudreach will use tools like AWS cloudendure, which enables users to automate the migration process and dramatically expedite the time it will take to deport their servers and applications to the cloud.

Once the applications are in the cloud, Cloudreach’s modernization phase begins using the new software that Cloudreach has developed – Sunstone. It supports enterprises in modernizing their applications and accelerating digital transformation. SMART Modernization™ harnesses the power of Sunstone and devops as a Service to accelerate cloud initiatives and deliver innovative new ways for businesses to achieve their goals.

Sunstone is a first-of-its-kind software platform that uses AI and machine learning to identify opportunities to modernize applications and actively recommend action plans. The solution enables users to tune existing cloud environments and optimize them to leverage the cloud-native innovations that cloud providers are bringing to the market. It then enables users to optimize their cloud environments to the specific needs of the applications – driving them more efficiently to capitalize on the emerging capabilities of the cloud.

Meanwhile, Conductor provides automation, orchestration and policy compliance for our Managed Services customers. It enables a rapid response to security and governance compliance issues as well as managing infrastructure discovery, backup and patching schedules, tag compliance and a host of similar cloud management tasks. Conductor is a central component of Cloudreach Managed Services, applying customers’ cloud management strategies directly to their cloud environments.

Cloudreach also offers devops as a Service that renders its broad-ranging cloud expertise accessible via a simple and flexible monthly subscription. In addition, Cloudreach teams work side by side with organizations, helping them embrace devops within their teams and continuously modernize and optimize based on bespoke business objectives.

Demonstrating Excellence through Ingenuity

Cloudreach has applied its range of solutions for many clients over the years, one of which was leading American furniture manufacturer Herman Miller.

The client was looking to migrate a mix of legacy and modern applications running roughly 1,000 workloads hosted on decades-old on-premise infrastructure to AWS.In addition, Herman Miller wanted to ensure there was enough capacity where and when needed, and enable the ability to swap and share between systems, increase overall transparency, and bring down the complexity of its overall cloud footprint to make it easier for IT staff to maintain/ manage.

Keith Van Eck, Vice President of Global IT Shared Services, at Herman Miller said: “We had to find a way to embrace the fear of change and simply get started. We knew that if we didn’t find a way to embrace the capabilities offered by the cloud, we would quickly fall behind our competition.”

Cloudreach undertook the migration of Herman Miller’s on-prem data center to AWS, using Cloudamize for a comprehensive application and infrastructure discovery assessment, and then implemented data-driven recommendations to execute a fast, secure, easy migration.
Cloudamize mapped out the client’s entire architecture, showing server interdependencies, inter-system communications, and the location of server workloads.

A cloud landing zone was set up to receive and acknowledge any applications that move into it, ensuring that the VPC is in place for ‘lift and shift’. This guaranteed that the right migration tool was selected, and networking on both sides would be ready to go. Using AWS cloud ensure, Herman Miller transferred all data from the on-prem data center to the cloud, and then applied continuous Delta updates.

Cloudreach’s managed services team provides 24/7 monitoring, patching and backup; this takes the burden off keeping applications up and running from the business units, while Cloudreach’s operations team can also look at potential cost optimizations.
Soon, applications were moved from the on-prem infrastructure to the cloud, so it may be run in AWS – showing performance increases of up to 1,300 percent without any optimization or modernization procedures. Herman Miller was also able to proactively monitor and resolve any downtime issues, spotting potential instances before they happen by checking utilization rates stayed below 90 percent. Ongoing work with AWS and Cloudreach has enabled a continuous look at the strategic business alignment between Herman Miller's applications in the cloud. Cloudreach then recommended additional optimizations and additional efficiencies to its cloud ecosystem as the journey unfolded. Herman Miller estimates that the work has been completed in half the time expected and that work is constantly accelerating.

Looking to the Future

Cloudreach has always taken client successes in its stride and is focused on expanding its services as the market expects a period of accelerated migration to the cloud. As businesses are adapting to the new normal, it is starting to see them move and accelerate their cloud initiatives. As a result, Cloudreach expects robust growth for the industry overall, as businesses progress from the early adopter phase into the mainstream adoption phase.

Geographically, Cloudreach is moving beyond the US and Western Europe, expanding into new regions including the Nordics, Eastern and Southern Europe and Canada. In addition to its growth, the company also wants to give back to the cloud community with the launch of a Cloudreach Talent Academy. The Academy will aim to create a wealth of new cloud talent, by hiring from a diverse pool of tech enthusiasts and engineers across a wide range of levels.

Having captured the market with the simple goal of democratizing cloud tech, Cloudreach is well on its way to modernizing the market and forging a new future for enterprises of all sizes.