Have you ever wished you had the equivalent of a Formula 1 pit crew on hand to help you with a tricky business challenge? Maybe you’re facing a new competitive threat, workforce turnover, post-pandemic planning, or embracing the latest cloud technology. Whatever the task, there’s a lot to be learned from auto racing pit crews, and they would surely come in handy when business shifts into the fast lane.
The F1 pit crew is a highly skilled, tightly coordinated team that runs like (pardon the expression) a well-oiled machine. No less than 20 mechanics hover around a race car, using perfect timing and the most sophisticated tools to change tires in two to three seconds. If repairs or other adjustments are needed, complex algorithms guide the crew to make the proper changes in the least amount of time. A few milliseconds here and there can mean the difference between coming in first place or tenth. The fewer the stops, the greater the chance for victory.
The same type of precision is required when a business tackles a significant task. For example, one of the most stressful challenges businesses face today is cloud transformation – adopting a cloud-driven approach to respond to the changes in day-to-day business operations. This is where a pit crew would surely come in handy.
Why? Think of it like this: Today’s F1 race car chassis is composed of some 11,000 components. The engine clocks in at 6,000 parts, and the electronics make up another 8,500. Altogether, that’s 25,000 separate parts that are at risk of failing during a race. And that’s just a tiny race car; how much more complex is a business with thousands of employees and products sold around the world?
As a leading provider of cloud connected infrastructure solutions, Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) introduced its Adaptive Cloud Engineering service earlier this year for that very reason. Certified cloud specialists, engineers, and architects are available to help clients accelerate their cloud initiatives from concept to delivery. Available as a flexible, on-demand consumption model, our Adaptive Cloud Engineering services enable customers to access qualified experts to deliver successful change.
To be sure, every Sungard AS cloud customer receives the support of its Next-Gen Managed Cloud Services Certified Architects and DevOps engineers. These teams spend months getting to know their customers so they can understand the intricacies of their business and IT architectures and provide 24x7x365 availability for questions or emergencies. We always use the latest tools built for the cloud, avoiding the manual “out-of-the-box” legacy model in favor of writing reusable code to deploy and manage each customer’s environment.
Adaptive Cloud Engineering Services go a step further, bringing intensified continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous engagement to an organization’s cloud transformation initiatives. With Sungard AS’ offering, customers may purchase one or more 20-hour blocks and consume engineering services as required. This may include any type of expertise a business needs, such as re-platforming legacy applications, developing cloud automation to enhance an application, Blue/Green deployment support, and marketplace appliance deployment and maintenance.
When time is of the essence and businesses can’t spend every second or lend every person to completing their cloud transformation, the idea of a pit crew becomes even more attractive. By doing things efficiently, our Adaptive Cloud engineers can get a customer on their feet faster, enabling them to move back out on the track and spin their business transactions much quicker.
Acting as a virtual instrument panel, Sungard AS’ Cloud Monitoring Platform enables customers to take advantage of their Application Performance Management and Synthetic Transactions configurations to fine-tune their performance. The Adaptive Cloud Engineering team can re-design and re-architect applications to suit a customer’s specific needs, and consultants are also available for cloud strategy development. Think of it as the pit crew stabilizing the car before it gets back on the track.
Like any good pit crew, we provide more than just CPU, disk and memory monitoring. Our teams have a default set of monitors per cloud environment that are tuned to each customer’s particular workload needs, providing custom application monitoring and dashboards. This enables them to work alongside customers to determine what will help deliver their business needs, with over 250 application integrations available.
The key is practice: putting the team through every different scenario imaginable, and then rehearsing and re-rehearsing the drill until it becomes part of their muscle memory. We have been doing this for over 40 years, with thousands of customers around the world, keeping businesses running all day, every day.
Adaptive Engineering Cloud Services go above and beyond the expected high levels of service to build a unique plan that delivers highly available, scalable, resilient, and secure hybrid IT solutions to ensure cloud customers are always on. Before you take another lap around the business circuit, think about having a cloud transformation pit crew to fine-tune your performance. Click here for more information on Adaptive Cloud Engineering.
