Five Reasons to Bring the “Scalable Cloud” To Your Business

Here at Blue Sentry, I’m the sales guy in a room of high tech, methodical engineers.  Sure, I can geek out over specs and features (I have two AWS certs myself) but at the end of the day, I am in it for the relationship.

So, historically, it has been tough not to get sidetracked when I’d meet with companies, eager to show them the advantages of cloud services — and to reach the point in the discussion when I realized their needs were much deeper, and more profound.

What I have learned is this:  When you’re making a strategic decision to use Amazon Web Services, your biggest challenge is not your legacy platform, or the complexity of your workloads.  It’s how to find people who really know cloud, and know what they are doing.

Cloud engineers, generally speaking, are in high demand today — and hard to find.  And just because you find them, doesn’t mean you will keep them!  Nor does it guarantee a perfect fit.  In order for development and operations teams to excel, they need chemistry. Achieving that lasting harmony takes a lot of time, and a dollop of trial and error – it is not as simple as checking off skills on a resume.  And a misstep can mean months of lost productivity, and the headache of replacing a bad hire.

Once you’ve made the commitment to cloud, you’re striving for a quick, painless implementation.  For you, “blue skies” represents a private cloud that performs effortlessly, along with the satisfaction of knowing you took the most direct, least invasive path to get there.  So, how do you move quickly and confidently, while avoiding costly mistakes?

At Blue Sentry, we think your talent pool should be elastic and scalable, just like your cloud services.  And the best conduit is an embedded team of experienced cloud engineers.  That beats hiring FTEs, hands down, for the following reasons:

More Cloud Experience

An FTE approaches problems from a single point of view and relies primarily on their own personal experience to solve those problems.  Embedded teams apply the combined experience of multiple engineers to solve problems.  Each has their own experience and approach to offer, and the team’s collaboration and combined effort yields results that are exponential in value.

More Cloud Certifications; More Skillsets

Our embedded teams have 15 AWS certifications, four DevOps engineers and a depth of cloud experience.  They are developers with an intimate understanding of operations. They apply their disciplines to infrastructure by writing infrastructure-as-code (IaC), the language of cloud.  Need SysOps, DevOps, and DBA skills?  Embedded teams carry more skillset and certifications than you will get from a single hire.

Scalability

Embedded teams use named engineers.  These engineers learn each business and become intimate with operations.  Your boss drops something new on your plate and wants fast results?  Your company makes an acquisition and needs to combine operations without missing a beat?  No problem. Burst your embedded team’s capacity and have the same engineers deliver more.   When the work is done, scale the team back down to their normal pace.   The embedded team model allows you to scale quickly and easily to meet changing demands, a huge benefit in the cloud.

Flexibility

Embedded teams are ready to roll, today – they have the experience, team chemistry, and certifications to start right now.  From the moment you deploy an embedded team, you are operating as a fully mature organization in the cloud.  And you have the flexibility to keep your team indefinitely — or just long enough to replace them with permanent hires when you are able. Whatever your long-term strategy for acquiring talent, embedded teams give you the flexibility you need to be successful.

Similar Cost

Blue Sentry has a unique approach to deploying embedded teams.  Customers can purchase a full team or a fraction of a team’s capacity.  Have the budget for a single FTE?  You can purchase a portion of the team’s capacity, and get the best talent the market can offer.

Is your search for the right people impacting your plans for the cloud?  A team approach might be the right choice for you.