If your business has invested in an Azure cloud solution, and you now need to complete a cloud architecture project, the most common approach will be to enlist the help of a Microsoft Azure consultant to do that for you.
An Azure consultant can act as part of your internal IT team, adding specialist skills to help you achieve your desired outcome.
Your architecture project would be scoped out and delivered as a package of work in isolation. From there, the consultant would likely leave you to deal with the rest of your cloud implementation.
One of the main issues with consultants is that they’ll carry out their work based on the information / objectives available at that point about your cloud infrastructure, your business, and the Azure platform, only in that one moment in time.
Hopefully, you’ll see why this approach doesn’t align well with an ever-evolving cloud environment. Things will change, and they’ll change often. Each time they do, that consultant will need to come back in to do further work on your cloud architecture at an additional cost.
Many organisations also find they’ve fallen into the trap of having a variety of different consultants on the payroll for different things simultaneously. As the cloud is so complex, specific skills are often needed to handle each key aspect. Therefore, one small-to-medium-sized business could have separate consultants working at the same time for their architecture, integration, security, support, and so on rather than a specialist partner which can be more efficient from a time / cost perspective.
Clearly, this is neither a cost-effective nor efficient method for simply keeping your business’s IT systems running smoothly. So, how can you successfully implement a cloud solution while also gaining the full ongoing support you deserve beyond deployment?