Business continuity using cloud services

Helping clients with their business continuity initiatives by leveraging the scalability and flexibility of cloud technologies

Technology is a key driver of businesses today. However, the ever-increasing dependency on technology also means that information technology (IT) services disruptions can affect the major functions of an organisation. These disruptions often have direct and cascading effects on revenue and markets. Organisations can better prepare themselves to tackle the impact of unforeseen events by shifting to cloud services and making their systems more agile.

Key challenges

Business continuity using cloud services - Key challenges

With employees working remotely, their productivity is most affected during business disruptions. Accessing critical data and digitising paper-based workflows pose major risks, without a secure cloud infrastructure.

Business continuity using cloud services - Key challenges

Capacity augmentation to offload spikes in systems and application utilisation and/or ramping down usage-based services to save costs is a complicated process.

Business continuity using cloud services - Key challenges

Ensuring disaster recovery (DR) readiness which often entails inventory discovery of current systems, forced DR drills and risk assessments needs agility.

Key benefits of leveraging Cloud for business continuity planning (BCP) initiatives

  • Employee Productivity: Maintain the pre-disruption employee productivity levels
  • Reduced Costs: Move from the capital expenditure “CAPEX” model to a “pay-as-you-go” model.
  • Deployment: A streamlined process for proof of concept to production and procurement reduces implementation time.
  • Automation: Easy automation of processes and repetitive tasks, helps minimise human errors.
  • Security: Cloud vendors share security responsibilities with clients. This helps businesses augment their security efforts.
  • Work-from-Home: Cloud often turns out a better infrastructure choice, considering that most organisations are moving towards a work-from-home/remote working culture

SAP on Azure - The Cloud for modern business

Microsoft and SAP have partnered to bring customers the best of both worlds, enabling customers to take advantage of on-demand resources in the cloud and maximize the value of their Microsoft and SAP investments. Microsoft Azure offers a reliable and secure cloud infrastructure platform that enables businesses to quickly deploy SAP solutions in the cloud. This collaboration helps customers to simplify infrastructure management, improve time to market, and lower costs.

Microsoft Azure offers great opportunities for your SAP solutions. We enable you to make the transition to Azure as per your business case. We fully support our customers in the transition to Azure and offer a wide range of services:

Workload Assessment and Cloud Roadmap

Workload Assessment and Cloud Roadmap

Plan and execute POC

Plan and execute POC

Migration to Azure

Migration to Azure

Managed Services

Managed Services

PwC’s cloud strategy, assessment and migration is based on PwC’s transform methodology and is fully aligned with Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). This cloud offering is designed to span across the customer's entire cloud adoption lifecycle which encompasses our 3 key offerings Cloud Strategy and Assessment, Cloud Infrastructure Setup and Migration and Managed Services. This framework consists of the following areas like assess, design, construct, implement, operate & review. Each of these areas are elucidated in detail below:

Assess Phase – This phase deals with identifying the business objectives, key drivers for cloud adoption and the IT challenges faced currently. A current state assessment is performed to understand the IT landscape from a cloud readiness perspective.

Design Phase – Cloud readiness of the applications in the IT landscape is determined using PwC’s proprietary application profiler tool. Once cloud readiness is identified, the business value of cloud is determined through TCO analysis. Other areas of cloud strategy like cloud security framework and standards, cloud adoption roadmap, operating model, governance model and DR & BCP strategy are defined in this phase

Construct Phase – In this phase, the target cloud architecture is constructed, and azure cloud readiness guide is designed. Validation is also performed in this phase to ensure that the best practices are incorporated.

Migration Phase – This phase deals with migration workloads, expanding the blueprint according to the designed strategy. The governance and reporting structure to communicate progress is prepared as a part of this phase

Operate & review –In this phase, the setup is reviewed to ensure that expected azure environment is achieved. The other activities are ensuring best practices validation and performing testing for validation and handing over to operations/managed services team after go live.

This tried and tested methodology has been leveraged in several successful engagements for our clients. Our solutions have enabled leading companies transition on to cloud seamlessly and successfully which has given their business an edge over competitors. We at PwC, help customers in their cloud adoption journey by providing end-to-end services from cloud assessment & strategy to cloud setup & migration and managed services. This solidifies our presence in the cloud market and helps us leverage our strong network for catering to our client’s needs

Our team helps in assessing customer’s IT landscape including infrastructure and applications and defining cloud strategy, benchmarking and designing cloud migration plan, creating implementation roadmaps. Based on the assessment, we help build business case with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for cloud adoption, DR strategy, governance, operating model and policies.

We provide end-to-end services in cloud infrastructure setup with automated deployments using infrastructure as a code(IaaC), setting up landing zone, working with the customer’s application team to define target application architecture on cloud as well as strategizing backup and disaster recovery mechanisms in accordance with business requirements

This covers end to end management of the environment spanning fully cloud based or Hybrid scenarios. PwC can extend their service management and governance frameworks to manage the entire lifecycle of the resources along with Business Continuity and Security frameworks.

PwC can support the environment based on their requirements and ensure the required support is provided for the cloud resources to achieve their stipulated uptime target as per the defined SLA. 

PwC’s Remote Hybrid Solution enhances employee experience by providing flexible and seamless access to e-resources while keeping their security intact. The engagement approach consists of phases such as envision, design, build and test, and deploy and adoption. Each of these phases is described below.

Envision
• Identifying the requirement by researching about customer challenges and opportunities
• Assessing the existing environment
• Defining use cases
• Understanding the solution component and its impact
• Discovering personas and mapping them to a customer’s business challenges

Design
• Designing the art of possible scenarios
• Showcasing the value of the solution
• Designing the logical and technical architecture of the solution
• Defining the flow of solution components and its interaction

Build and test
• Preparing immersive experiences and a demo environment, if required
• Building the solution component by integrating AVD, Power Apps and Teams
• Performing user acceptance testing (UAT) and integration testing

Deploy and adoption
• Testing the deployment for a few sets of users
• Completing the deployment of the solution
• Hand-holding the administrative team

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Vivek  Belgavi

Vivek Belgavi

Partner and Leader, Cloud Transformation, PwC India

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