Cloud Architecture

Broadstroke has the distinction of having expertise in Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Goggle GCP cloud environments. Our approach to Cloud Architecture is always driven by the business goals established. Many organizations start the conversation with 'We want to go to the Cloud', but sometimes struggle with the next step which is 'How do we do it'. We at Broadstroke can help with that next step. Our Cloud Architects can help your organization determine what the definition of success is when moving to the cloud.

Once we know what the definition of success is, we can then work out the details, such as determining the appropriate workload to move to the cloud, determine if we are doing a 'lift and shift', 'refactor' or 'rearchitect' of the application and support infrastructure for the workload.

Lift and shift is essentially taking backups of your on premises machines supporting the workload and restoring them in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) area of the Cloud Vendor desires. An example of this would be a Commerically Off The Shelf (COTS) product that MUST be install on a server to function. This would mean for this workload to be supported in the cloud we would need to maintain the servers in their current state to support the workload.

Refactor is the act of evaluating the current work, identifying aspects that can be moved from a servers to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) service offering. An example of this would be movement of a COTS product that uses a separate database enginer, such as SQL Server. We can move the application server in a Lift and Shift fashion and then move the database to a PaaS SQL Database engine on the selected Cloud Vendor.

Rearchitect is the act of taking an in-house developed application and rearchitecting the code to be supported 100% on a PaaS service offering. An example would be a Web Application with a Database to support it. The Web Application code may need some modifications, but can be supported by a PaaS Web Service that would run the Web Site and then have a PaaS Database Service to run the database. This would eliminate the need of a traditional server completely.

Once an approach has been established, we can assist in several ways. We can supply your team with the 'road map' to accomplish this migration to the cloud. We can also provide support and coaching to your team through the migration journey. Or we could provide Cloud Engineers to help establish the base environment and work side by side with your team. If none of those options are for you, we are able to implement the migration for your team.

We are excited to offer our flexibility to help your organization through your journey to the cloud.