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Cloud Consultancy Services

Assisting enterprises on the road to Cloud adoption

Little knowledge is yet available about when it is advisable for a service provider – either a business organization or a governmental institution – to migrate existing services into a cloud environment and how to execute this migration in terms of financial resources, human resources, time span, risks, worth-of-investment vesting of such a migration. Cloud Consultancy brings on the table the means to identify and the way to approach the services commercially valuable enough to invest in.

   The Cloud technologies promise to deliver a wide range of benefits, including the shift from CAPEX to OPEX, lowering overall costs, agility, viability and the list goes on. The main issue however is “HOW TO ADOPT the Cloud?” meaning how to implement and how to take advantage of all growing benefits that this wide range of technologies – Cloud computing technologies – brings on the table.

   The prospective benefits of the Cloud need to be examined carefully and mapped against challenges such as security, performance, availability, transparency, licensing and integration. As cloud computing proliferates so does the need for cloud technologies consumption consultancy. Cloud Services Brokerage companies already are on the market and Gartner expects that the number of such service providers will increase at an accelerated rate in the following years. The market pushes the consumers to migrate towards Cloud technologies more and more each day and the need for cloud services integrations arises and so does the associated challenge of integrating multiple cloud services and their respective providers in a holistic approach.

   The business model aimed by Cloud Consultancy Services division of Knowledge Investment Group is similar to that of a cloud services brokerage company in terms of playing an intermediary role between the beneficiary of the cloud services and the cloud services provider.  Nonetheless our approach goes beyond and we offer both our technology integration services as well as our pure consultancy services. The services provided by Knowledge Investment Group range from detailed analysis engineering of beneficiary business-data flow in order to maximize the potential gains of a Cloud adoption process, engineering the architecture of the Cloud solution up to development of custom interfaces and data brokerage connectors between existing beneficiary IT systems and adopted Cloud solution. In a detailed list we can present our services as follows:In the generic area of IT&C services our company offers a wide range of information technology consultancy services based the following strong assets:

• Analysis of existing customer information systems for the preparation of cloud readiness report
• Requirements engineering process for future customer cloud infrastructure
• Cloud architecture engineering based on customer provided requirements or consultant developed analysis report
• Cloud project implementation management
• Cloud infrastructure purchase support including detailed market research and tendering support
• Cloud services brokerage including integration and custom development
• Cloud services monitoring and evaluation
• Development of corporate cloud policy
• Organization-wide cloud adoption support and monitoring

    Another important approach of KIG-CCS division if offering special services to its customers for accommodation process that comes with Cloud adoption. These services include – beside establishing a new purchasing model for future investments – the process of assisting different business units of the customer to interact with the Cloud adoption process.

    One of the simplest and most straight-forward service packages offered by KIG-CCS it is the development of a private cloud within a new beneficiary data center.  As Gartner recommends, enterprises are supposed to apply the concepts of cloud computing to future infrastructure investments to increase agility and efficiency. As a result one of the most basic approaches is investing in a Cloud enabled data center.  The development of a fully Cloud enabled data center will involve a wide range of consultancy services. These consultancy services will have to include analysis of corporate needs and existing infrastructure, architecture of the future cloud infrastructure solution and design of the new data center and last but not least customer assistance in the purchase process for all segments of the solution. The purchase process will be functionally divided within three main categories such as data center physical construction and equipment, Cloud optimized hardware infrastructure and Cloud management software solution.

Finally we can summarize the direct objectives of our cloud brokerage services as follows:

1. Choosing for our customer the best vendor based on service, cost and other customer needed parameters
2. Minimize the risk and complexity related to integration of multiple cloud services into customer business processes
3. Minimize security risks introducing integrated single sign-on authentication, authorization and access control
4. Minimize operational issues by centralization of SLAs, technical help, billing

Information Technology services

   In the generic area of IT&C services our company offers a wide range of information technology consultancy services based the following strong assets:

• Software analysis, architecture and implementation consultancy: our experts can either assist the customer on a full products development life-cycle or can aid on a particular stage of the project.

• Software Project Management and Software Quality Assuranceconsultancy based on international standards (e.g. PMI/PMBOK, etc): Our Software Project Management approach is based on a particular principle and that is using former Senior Developers turned Software Architects and finally specialized in Project Management for the management activities within our IT&C projects. Although Project Management is a whole domain by itself we are working to maximize the success potential of our software projects by using managers with strong horizontal and vertical experience in the field.

• Consultancy for business process automation: if the customer business needs upgrade of its information technology support then we will dig deep in the client organization business processes and find out what needs improvement or what needs to be build from scratch. A industrial production  company who wants to optimize the production life-cycle and maximize the profits, a retail sales corporation that needs to improve the consumer relationship processes, a financial company that wants to stay in touch more closely both with market information and with it’s customers: those are a few examples of our projects and strong experience in the field of business process automation.

• CRM consultancy including Business Intelligence Systems / OLAP / Data-Warehouse with Multi-Tier architectures. If Customer Relationship Management its a science by itself then Business Intelligence its an art. This particular area of software consultancy is one of the most important within our IT&C consultancy division and that is why we present it separately from the general consultancy in business process automation. In a straight and blunt approach we can synthesize our target like this: Our focal point in this area is to give our customer the right tools in order for him to make more money than it is currently making.

• Information Security Consultancy (data encryption, data protection, tolerant systems when malfunction, etc) IT system evaluation – BS 7799, ISO 17799, audit, etc.