Planet Technologies Prepares State of CA Departments for Successful Azure Cloud Adoption

The demand and interest for organizations to provide a suitable public-cloud environment are rapidly increasing. Discovery, planning, and implementation of Azure Cloud Adoption can be a very rigorous process and often falls short of succeeding before cloud adoption begins. Organizations should prioritize the upfront development of a cloud framework to ensure a successful Azure Cloud Adoption. Whether your organization is interested in replacing aging data centers, developing modern applications, or driving innovation Planet can help. Planet’s approach allows organizations to avoid costly mistakes such as cloud-sprawl, unforeseen costs, and security gaps.

Planet Technologies has developed a two-phased approach focused on Microsoft Azure – an approach designed to accelerate the transformation process. Through technical implementation and governance-oriented workshops, Planet helps Central IT get ahead of the curve and establish a framework for meeting demands. Planet’s two-phased approach consists of Azure Enterprise Cloud Assessment (ECA) and Azure Enterprise Cloud Readiness (ECR).
ECA is designed for organizations interested in starting a transition to Microsoft Azure. ECA utilizes an exclusive set of tools and features designed to quickly aggregate all relevant IT asset information to populate dashboards, reports, and diagrams critical to the successful and cost-efficient use of Microsoft Azure. ECA is built around an unobtrusive discovery tool that gives your organization access to a single-pane-of-glass to launch assessments, analyze workload dependencies, properly size assets, view financial projections and comparisons, and to plan the migration strategy for each application. ECA will programmatically reveal which servers talk to each other so that applications can be grouped for migrations, map existing servers to their recommended size in Microsoft Azure based on near-time performance metrics, and provide many other analytical features. These results are crucial for a successful cloud adoption and help your organization make decisions, both business and technical.
ECA includes an overview of the dashboard process for launching an assessment, planning to define the number of assessments required and any customized options.
ECA assessments cover the following topic areas:

• Asset Discovery and Inventory
• Asset Migration Readiness
• Application Dependencies
• Application Refactoring Guidance

Enterprise Cloud Readiness (ECR)
Once your organization has completed ECA, the next step is to engage in Planet’s Enterprise Cloud Readiness (ECR). ECR engagement is made up of a technical implementation and in-depth workshops designed to equip new and existing Azure Government customers with a framework for operating within the Microsoft Cloud without sacrificing security, integrity, or design standards. ECR begins with a baseline framework of Azure resources and topics, such as subscription design, network architecture, resource taxonomy, Role-Based-Access-Control, billing optimization, logging & alerting, and other integrated services key to an enterprise-grade structure in Azure. It is critical that new Azure customers become intimately aware of and familiar with key Azure settings and services to protect workloads in the cloud and operate cost-effectively. A good portion of the ECR engagement is spent educating and designing what will become the baseline architecture for your initial subscription(s). This initial deployment will act as the “Hub” for IT to establish a centralized environment to host common services, enforce policies, and open the door for the rest of the organization to innovate and build without sacrifice.

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