Cloud adoption with the security baseline built in

Cloud adoption is the work of deciding which systems should leave your data centre, what has to change in ownership, cost review, and skills before they do, and in what order the move should happen. SEYA Group runs that decision as a short consulting engagement, so the business case your board sees is built from your own estate and your own bills. The security baseline, including identity, logging, and network boundaries, is part of that case.

For migration programmes where security is not the driver, our sister company Cloud Architects Expert leads the architecture and move.

Who this is for

CIOs and CTOs who have been asked "why are we still running our own hardware?" and want an answer they can defend. IT managers whose data centre lease, hardware refresh, or support contract is coming up and who need to know what to renew. Enterprise architects who have a target in mind and need the ownership and cost questions settled before anyone opens an account.

If your team already knows which applications are moving and needs them moved, start with cloud platform and migration instead. This page is for the step before that.

Problems we solve

• The data centre sets the limit on where and how fast software can run.
• Infrastructure spend is hard to tie to the teams and products that use it.
• Nobody has agreed who will own a cloud account, its bills, and its access after a move.
• Different groups are quietly starting their own cloud footprints with no shared rules.
• Leadership wants an independent recommendation and has so far only heard from vendors.

What you get

• Adoption case. A written recommendation of what should move, what should stay, and what has to be true first, with the options that were considered and the reasons they were set aside.
• Cost shape. A comparison of your current always-on capacity with consumption-based spend for the workloads you describe, showing where capacity sits idle today. It is an input to your business case, in your finance team's format.
• Ownership model. Who owns accounts, identity, network, and cost review once workloads are in the cloud, written for the people who will do the job.
• Readiness baseline. The skills, operating routines, and security ownership that need to exist before the first workload moves, with gaps listed per team.
• Sequenced next step. A brief for the migration or development work that follows, so the next engagement starts from agreed facts.

How an engagement runs

• Scoping call. You describe the estate, the pressure behind the question, and who needs to sign off. We agree what the case has to answer.
• Discovery. Working sessions with infrastructure, application, security, and finance owners. We start from the inventory, bills, and contracts you already hold.
• Options and draft case. We present candidate platforms and paths, with the trade-offs written down, and take your team's corrections.
• Final case and readout. The adoption case, cost shape, ownership model, and readiness baseline, presented to the people who decide. Your team keeps the decision.

Technical scope

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are all in scope as candidate platforms, and the recommendation is made per estate. The readiness work covers account and organisation structure, identity and access, network design, and the infrastructure as code practice (Terraform, for example) your team would need to operate the result. Where a first foundation is part of the brief, as it was for LiveRamp's first Google Cloud environment, that design is handed to the build phase with the ownership questions already settled.

What you need in place

You will need an executive sponsor who can get infrastructure, application, security, and finance owners into the same sessions, and read access to the inventory, bills, and contracts you already hold. Where documentation is thin, discovery takes longer, and we say so at the start.

Out of scope here: building the landing zone and moving workloads, which is cloud platform and migration; rebuilding an application onto containers or managed services, which is cloud-native development; and changing how your delivery teams are organised, which is enterprise transformation. The adoption case names which of those should come next.

Related work

• LiveRamp: a first Google Cloud foundation with shared networking, GKE, and granular IAM
• Clearly: the decision to leave Rackspace and on-premises hosting for AWS, then the move itself

Questions buyers ask

Will you recommend a specific cloud?

Yes, when the evidence supports one. The case names a platform, the reasons, and the alternatives we considered. If two options are close, we say that too and set out what would tip the choice.

How long does discovery take?

It depends on how much of your estate is already documented and how quickly owners can be in the room. We agree the number of sessions in the scoping call and tell you early if the inventory is thinner than expected.

Who owns the output?

You do. The case, cost model, and readiness baseline are written for your teams, in your document formats, and they are yours to reuse with another supplier or internally.

Does the case commit us to using SEYA for the migration?

No. The case is written so that any competent team can carry it out. You can continue with us, since the people who wrote the case already know the estate, but that is your call.

If your organisation is weighing a move and needs a case it can defend, book a cloud adoption scoping call. Bring the question you have been asked.