Join us on the journey.
Moving your family album to the Cloud for safe-keeping is easy. Moving your growing or global business is a different matter. But Public Cloud is the destination of choice for nearly every business today, with Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google's GCP the established leaders.
There is good reason behind the Cloud revolution. Increasingly sophisticated technology, mature Cloud engineering and experienced Cloud management is leading to higher business revenues – delivering greater insight and capability, greater customer satisfaction, differentiated products and services, and greater agility and flexibility. The Cloud is also enabling new business models to emerge that can challenge traditional ways of doings things.
But the journey is a challenge. This is where we can help.
We breathe Cloud
You may know us from the past for hosting and datacentres. But today we are first and foremost a Cloud business.
We have invested heavily to be the partner of choice and help enterprises and business take full advantage of extra flexibility and agility in the Cloud. We have spent years hiring the best talent, investing in the best tooling, and designing solutions and engagements that help to make successful Cloud adoption a reality.
The result: you can rely on an army of technical Cloud engineers, architects, and project managers to help you make the right decisions at the right time and to help your business move forward on YOUR cloud journey.
Whether you are already partially in the Cloud, looking to optimise and adopt more Cloud Native technology, or planning your first steps away from a legacy datacentre, we are here to help.
From a single project to solve a Cloud Native implementation issue, throught to a full migration of your entire estate, our team will give you the experienced support you need.
In many cases, this grows into a long-term partnership with our customers, with teams working in close collaboration to continuously improve and modernise their Cloud environment and introduce new, flexible services.
Defining the right migration path for your business.”
First steps
We don’t start by assuming we know all the answers for you. Instead we recognise every business has its own unique challenges and we like to work hand-in-hand with our customers to identify the right way forward. To help understand how to start the journey, we have developed a structured Cloud adoption engagement we call Competitive Edge. It’s how we ensure you can gain that real and measurable advantage over your competition, through Cloud adoption.
Our team will work with you to:
- Discover the IT and Application estate you have today (it can often be a surprise). We will create a shared understanding of the legacy that sits within your IT estate, how data and processes run through your infrastructure, and focus on the key applications and services which keep your business running.
- Build a Cloud Strategy that suits your desires and needs. We will evaluate your internal capability and organisational setup today and the skills you will need in the Cloud, and provide you with a documented way forward, based on industry best practice, to help you deliver your desired outcomes.
- Establish your Cloud migration path and the project plan.. We will offer clear advice about what parts of your estate can be moved to the Cloud, what can’t be moved, and the best course of action to mitigate risk and maintain business as usual. There is no single right answer for everyone. The migration path needs to be built around your business.
In other words, we can clearly map out your journey to the Cloud with no commitment, and at minimal or zero cost.
The next step is how to execute your migration to the Cloud?
Move fast
Seamless Rapid migration is what we aim for. We want to get you there at speed.
It’s true that lift ‘n’ shift has something of a bad name, and quite rightly so if all you are going to do is move your assets to the Cloud and then do nothing more. The industry is full of those horror stories. (see Time to grow below).
But often with our customers, there is a compelling event that has focused attention on a move to Cloud. A datacentre that needs to be closed, a license obligation looming… the time to move to Cloud is now or face a huge future cost. Perhaps green fielding the entire IT estate is just not an option in these cash-sensitive times. All of these and many more drivers often lead to our engagements being time sensitive. You may need to achieve an outcome in a certain time to make your TCO work.
We do not frown on lift-and-shift as a solution for our customers. In fact we have performed many significant large IT migrations of this sort with minimal disruption to the day-to-day of the business and measurable financial and operational benefits in the long term – what is key is working with you to ensure that optimisation, modernisation and transformation are planned for – either before, during or after migration.
We have demonstrated with one customer a “cost of Cloud”, post lift and shift of nearly £30mio over 5 years at the end of lift-and-shift – But, through the rigorous application of Cloud Economics, immediate implementation of optimisation of resources, modernisation of services (for instance to PaaS alternatives) from the easiest and immediate to the harder more complex solutions later all the way through to transformative Cloud Native solutions to end-of-life the legacy – across the Lifecyle of the Customers business-case – an adjustment to under £10mio in the same 5 year period. This is why at Claranet we say the Journey is the most important thing.
Meanwhile, Claranet recognise that not everything can yet go to Cloud – the technical and security reasons diminish every year, but still there are some – other reasons including legal obligations to maintain legacy data for instance, and increasing regulation on data and governance often lead at least in the short term, to a need to maintain legacy IT Infrastructure.
Our heritage as a managed service provider in the Datacentre space enables us to continually offer our customers hybrid solutions, with us providing all the traditional services you might need to put a holistic solution together – from datacentre housing, hosting all the way to fully managed services across legacy infrastructure – we can support the full Journey to Cloud – over many years.
In for the long journey
The whole raison-d’etre of the Cloud business at Claranet is to build long-term relationships with our customers.
We’re not just a consultancy that fixes an immediate problem and then moves on. We’re certainly not just a lift ‘n’ shift house who sends in the removal men and then says job done.
Our focus is on providing the right services for each customer to grow and compete in the future. As much as they want, or as little as they need.
Financial Operations is a point in case and maybe not your first thought when you think managed services. Cloud in itself should not always be considered a cost saving exercise – but measured holistically, it often can be a significant reduction in spend over the long term within a business. Done wrong, it can be highly costly. What's needed is an expert understanding of Cloud Economics and a rigorous application of “FinOps” – to continually manage down and make sure the cost of cloud is predictable and as efficient as possible. This is part of all our managed service offerings that as a long-term run partner to our customers, we do every day to ensure spend is forecastable, controlled and efficient.
Often following a lift and shift of a traditional IT Estate, the need may include a traditional managed IT service (service desk, ITIL processes, formal incident and change management etc.). For others, a more informal DevOps style may be more attractive, with our teams blended with your teams (still working to the highest SLAs and committed availability). For others, we can act more as a 4th and 5th line warranty provider to backup and provide support to your internal teams.
We want our service to feel as flexible and as agile as the Cloud itself. Gone are the mandatory multi-year commitments with minimal spend commitments. Instead, we rely on our service delighting you time and time again – so Claranet become your partner of choice to keep your Cloud-based-IT running reliable day after day, year after year.
We are here to give you a menu of options and, importantly with low commitment levels. We can do this because we don’t own the platform anymore, we don’t need you locked in - it’s all in the Cloud. So, we can work with you month-by-month, day-by-day… rather than year-by-year with you locked in.
The most exciting stage: the chance to explore, ask new questions, and unleash your curiosity.
Time to grow
Migrating to the Cloud is a huge effort, but when your business arrives in the Cloud the journey has only just begun.
Now is the time to modernise and optimise your legacy estate, so you can manage costs effectively and take full advantage of Cloud Native technologies. It’s also the time to create entirely new services that are born in the cloud.
Whether it’s building a flexible, self-scaling, auto-healing e-commerce platform that can handle huge spikes in demand over Black Friday, or taking control of your Big Data with machine learning and AI, continuous improvement and innovation in the Cloud can transform the way your business operates.
This stage in your journey is where we started our journey in the Cloud five years ago, and we can now offer world-leading expertise.
It’s the most exciting stage. The chance to explore, ask new questions, and unleash your curiosity.
You are asking us to look after your baby in the Cloud. You need to know it’s safe.
Secure by design
We will give you a new Cloud environment that is completely secure. No ifs. No buts.
In every engagement Cloud Security is one of the first conversations. Not at the end as you can see on the page here. In fact, Cloud Security is part of every conversation.
We’ve invested heavily in migrating and managing data securely, and Cloud Security is one of the most important planning artefacts we deliver as part of the Competitive Edge consultancy service.
Get this right and our experience is that your data and systems are more secure in the Cloud than it is in your data centre.
Our aim is simple: to be a fantastic service partner.
And finally …
Our core objective is be a trusted long-term partner for our customers so we can continue help them on the journey to the Cloud. To achieve the best outcomes for everyone, we have developed an approach that is massively more flexible than the way traditional IT service relationships used to work.
This is all underpinned by huge investment to develop the Cloud business at Claranet into a unit that pushes the boundaries and delights customers time and again.
Ultimately, our ambition is your ambition: our customers taking full advantage of the flexibility, agility, and power of the Cloud to reap great financial rewards and grow their businesses for the future.
We’d love to talk. Outcome based cloud transformation starts with a conversation. Use the contact information to tell us a little about your business and the challenges you’re facing.
