Accelerate your Digital Transformation with AWS Cloud Repeatable Solutions and SoftServe Trusted Advisory Service

Intro

My name is Ruslan Kusov. I’m a Senior Solution Architect, AWS Ambassador and Leader of AWS Cloud Center of Excellence expertise at SoftServe. As a part of my role and responsibilities I lead an AWS Cloud Cluster that develops repeatable solutions for our clients. These solutions help our clients to accelerate their AWS cloud adoption, solve related migration and modernization challenges. Or rephrasing that – helps our clients to accelerate their digital transformation with advantages of AWS cloud platform, its products, managed services, and tools.

With this blog article I would like to start a series of posts on AWS cloud repeatable solutions, related consultancy offers, frameworks, tools, and techniques my AWS Cloud Cluster and I created based on AWS best practices, services, guidance, solutions, our personal experience, knowledge, lessons learnt and client success stories. I’ll share some of those cases to give you a context by describing client’s specific challenges and story that led us to a proposed solution and delivered value for a client. My apologies, but I won’t use names or client’s details to not violate any NDA.

Before I start with the first post let me clarify what we call an AWS cloud repeatable solution. Let’s imagine I want to implement AWS Auto Scaling to maintain predictable performance at lower cost for my application launched on AWS EC2. I can manually create new AMI for launch configuration and manually recreate it each time (and update launch configuration) I have new version of my application released. But that also means higher possibility for human errors and misconfiguration. And will lead to negative impact on business – higher maintenance costs, potential security issues and service downtimes. To avoid that we can automate things by using EC2 Image Builder and/or other similar tools to build and test AMIs, CloudFormation to manage launch configurations and autoscaling groups. And this approach can be reused by other. I believe my case with implementation of AWS Auto Scaling is not unique, so other people have similar challenges. So, instead of reinventing the wheel they can reuse my solution to solve same problems. It can be done either “out of the box” using default code and configurations or it can be customized if there are specific requirements. For example, use Terraform instead of CloudFormation if it’s a company standard.

It’s just a basic example to explain you an idea. Now scale it, focus on technologies or industries – think about large migrations, AWS cloud foundation/landing zone, modernizing applications with containers and microservices, application performance monitoring, centralized logging, security controls, costs insights and cloud cost optimization techniques, inventory management systems, medical data extraction, time series data analysis and many others. Same principles can be applied.

AWS created AWS Solutions Library. These solutions follow the concept I described above. There you can find a variety of industry and technology-specific solutions from AWS and AWS Partners. My team uses this approach as well and develops own AWS cloud repeatable solutions. These are rapid assessments, cloud optimization solutions, Shared Services Platform for containers, customized AWS Landing Zone and other. Some of them are listed on AWS Marketplace.

In this post I would like to share how our AWS cloud repeatable solutions accelerate digital transformation for our clients and talk about SoftServe Trusted Advisor role. ?

How We Understand Digital Transformation and Its Challenges

Diagram below illustrates digital transformation:

Fig. 1 – What is digital transformation?

Digitalization and automation are two key components of digital transformation. Both require changes and investment from organizations. Our clients are often concerned about these requirements, and they are not confident that digital transformation creates any business value.

What about green box in Figure 1? My AWS Cloud Cluster consider that as an extra key component that glues digitalization and automation together. I would even say that 200+ AWS cloud managed services implement these digitalization and automation. Good example – medical insurance company that receives thousands of handwritten prescriptions, doctor’s notes, lab results, other medical documents. Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend helps to extract required medical entities from that documents and use them for further needs. AWS Lambda will automate processes by being triggered when scanned document is uploaded to Amazon S3, invoking Amazon Textract to extract text from this document and sending the extracted text to Amazon Comprehend for medical entities extraction. These digitalization and automation speedup an insurance claim processing and optimize it.

With this case you can see that any business benefits from digital transformation. Not only digital native business as some people may think.

But in this example I described a specific challenge for medical insurance company. Let’s discuss another case for a bank which wants to develop a service to deposit checks. Another problem statement, but the same AWS services and solution architecture can be used to process handwritten checks and extract required entities. It is a repeatable component for both business challenges. So, what about repeatable solution for that? There is The Document Understanding Solution in AWS Solutions Library that can be applied for a similar case. It can be customized per specific needs or used as is. With available code and implementation guide it accelerates deployment for clients and decrease their investment. There is no need to design this solution from scratch, and investment for any customization will be much lower. Besides, the solution is Well-Architected.

Except implementing better cost controls and improving ROI usage of AWS cloud repeatable solutions helps to:

• Keep focus on business needs and product development.
• Reduce Time to Market for new services and features.
• Guarantee determined security standards at scale.
• Scale globally.

I’ll talk about that in my future posts describing our other AWS cloud repeatable solutions.

SoftServe Trusted Advisory Service

So, we figured out that digital transformation creates a business value and accelerates business transformation. And utilization of AWS cloud repeatable solutions accelerates digital transformation and decreases needed investment from organizations. But what about required changes? Are they any other concerns? ???

Figure 2 illustrates three main organizational components that require changes – People, Processes and Technologies. Also, it shows frequently asked questions we get from our clients. ??

Fig. 2 – Main organizational components of digital transformation and FAQ

I would also specify these questions related to AWS cloud adoption:

People specific:

• Do we have skills to use AWS cloud and maintain our solutions there?
• Do we have enough experts to keep our digital transformation going?

Process specific:

• Do we have processes and standards defined for AWS cloud?

Technology specific:

• Do we use right AWS services and accelerate our digital transformation instead of slowing it down with our wrong choices?
• Are we aware of all AWS services and solutions that could help us with our business transformation?

These questions are frequently asked by stakeholders from multiple organizations of different sizes. I believe it’s fair to say that we are talking about common challenges for digital transformations; so, a concept of repeatable solution can be applied here as well. And my AWS Cloud Cluster team did that and developed SoftServe Trusted Advisory Service.

How it works? Figure 3 illustrates one of possible digital transformation scopes. Let’s use it as an example for further discussion.

Fig. 3 – Scope for digital transformation

There is a main company (on the left side) in a process of AWS cloud adoption. C-suite supports digital transformation and understand its benefits. VPs are responsible for success, Security and Operations teams are established and workload boundaries are defined… But digital transformation is slow, there is budget overrun, AWS cloud is not used as a powerful accelerator, development teams don’t collaborate, there are no standards defined for tools, services, infrastructure components. Operations team has high team turnover – experts are exhausted because they must support multiple different components, have regular night calls, deal with continuous production issues and downtimes. And this main company has recently acquired another big company. Now they have post-merger integration. Acquired company was in a process of migration to AWS cloud and establishment of their security and operations team. SoftServe Trusted Advisory Service helps to accelerate digital transformation and remediate related risks. ?

Service consists of two main components or phases - Advanced Consultancy and Trusted Advisory.

Phase 1 – Advanced Consultancy

Advanced Consultancy is a repeatable solution in a format of professional services that utilizes AWS cloud Advisory Service Framework created by my AWS Cloud Cluster. Within 40 hours trained Advanced Consultant provides for a client:

• Technical interviews and workshops.
• Technical advisory on AWS cloud, security, networking, CI/CD, automation.
• DevOps culture overview.
• Verification of business needs and requirements.
• Recommendations for developing, designing, and improving of existing and new cloud workloads.
• Cooperation with AWS account team, coordination, and alignment with business and technical client’s stakeholders and SMEs on their goals and business needs. That keeps stakeholders’ focus and helps them to hear each-other.
• Architecture evaluation workshop for determined (critical) workloads.

These activities help to analyze client’s current state of digital transformation and understand why AWS cloud is not used as its accelerator. At the end of these engagement Advanced Consultant produces a final report that includes gap analysis, remediation recommendations, acceleration recommendations for digital transformation and proposed roadmap with priorities.

Coming back to our example from Figure 4 here is how this final Advanced Consultancy report can answer to the questions about utilization of AWS cloud as an accelerator for digital transformation: ??

People specific:

• Do we have skills to use AWS cloud and maintain our solutions there? – Answer: No, but we can use AWS Skill Builder to build in-demand cloud skills, work with AWS service partners and get AWS Immersion Days on multiple topics conducted for our team.
• Do we have enough experts to keep our digital transformation going? – Answer: No, critical path is AWS cloud migration for a recently acquired company. But we can work with AWS service partners to address immediate needs and replan partner’s engagement later once we have enough experts with required skills internally. ?????

Process specific:

• Do we have processes and standards defined for AWS cloud? – Answer: No, but we can work with AWS service partners and use their help to launch our Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), run assessments and use DACI Decision Making Framework to set company standards.

Technology specific:

• Do we use right AWS services and accelerate our digital transformation instead of slowing it down with our wrong choices? – Answer: Partially. AWS service partners can run assessments and use DACI Decision Making Framework to identify services and tools that meet our requirements and should be used as a standard.
• Are we aware of all AWS services and solutions that could help us with our business transformation? – Answer: No, but gaining new knowledge from AWS and AWS service partners we will make more informed decisions. Also, we can use AWS service partners’ experience and repeatable solutions, like AWS Landing Zone by SoftServe, Cost Optimization Assessment by SoftServe, Shared Services Platform for EKS by SoftServe, DataMask by SoftServe, etc.

As you can see most of the answers refer to AWS service partners. Same question. Can we apply a concept of repeatable solution to address these common clients’ needs? My AWS Cloud Cluster team did that and with the second component of SoftServe Trusted Advisory Service.

Phase 2 – Trusted Advisory

Advanced Consultancy solution helps our clients to identify digital transformation gaps and risks, get risk remediation recommendations and roadmap with implementation priorities, get understanding of how AWS cloud repeatable solutions can be used as an accelerator for their digital transformation. Now we should proceed with implementation of these recommendations and roadmap. But there are dependencies on AWS service partners – clients need their experts with proper skills for certain milestones, knowledge, and specific repeatable solutions. Also, digital transformation is a continuous process. Clients evolve and there will be another business priorities and goals tomorrow. New challenges occur. Clients get data today and tomorrow they will want to extract actionable insights from this data. They will need an expert who’ll recommend a time and cost-effective way to do that, or other experts who will deploy a repeatable solution for that.

Clients need a Digital Transformation Keeper – a person they can trust – Trusted Advisor. Please don’t be confused with AWS Trusted Advisor service. Here I’m talking about a role – Trusted Advisor – that provides Trusted Advisory repeatable solution in a format of professional services using AWS cloud Advisory Service Framework created by my AWS Cloud Cluster.

Figure 4 illustrates key ideas and a concept of Trusted Advisory repeatable solution applied to the organization from our example.

Fig. 4 – Ideas and a Concept of Trusted Advisory Repeatable Solution by SoftServe

New element in these diagram – SoftServe Implementation Squad. So, once we know the priorities for digital transformation, we can start implementing solutions. To address skills/experts needs SoftServe has multiple COEs focused on different solutions: migration to AWS, application development and modernization, Big Data, AI/ML, Security, etc. Experts from these COEs are certified and experienced. They are onboarded to SoftServe Implementation Squads for a duration of implementation of specific solution. Like data center retirement and full migration to AWS for the acquired company from our example. Trusted Advisor coordinates engaged squads and plan squads’ compositions for future iterations (phases) of digital transformation. Except that Trusted Advisor:

• Starts and maintains Client’s Cloud Center of Excellence.
• Provides technical expertise in developing, designing, and improving of existing and new cloud workloads, coordinates activities and cooperation with AWS account team, works with client’s business and technical stakeholders to coordinate their goals and align on updated business needs.
• Develop DevOps culture for a client.
• Maintain client’s digital transformation.

SoftServe Trusted Advisory Service is a great example of AWS cloud repeatable solutions we develop in our AWS Cloud Cluster. It’s based on our AWS cloud Advisory Service Framework and delivered in a format of professional services. But it requires unique skills from our experts. In fact, this role is between technical and business and requires both skills. This service is delivered by AWS Solution Architects Generalists from my team. I grow these unique experts using a methodology and approaches I created for AWS Cloud Cluster at SoftServe. Important part of these experts’ development is partnership and collaboration with different AWS teams, and creation of AWS cloud repeatable solutions. I’ll talk about other AWS cloud repeatable solutions we developed in my next posts from this series. Stay tuned!