Blog Insights
How Do You Organize Your Cloud?
Most nonprofits and government agencies use the cloud in some capacity–from website hosting to software to data storage. And while many have plans to move more of their operations to cloud engineering services, few are taking full advantage of the opportunities that the private sector has already realized.
With smaller budgets, competing demands, and fewer IT specialists in-house, many mission-driven organizations struggle to optimize cloud engineering services.
If you’re confused about how to approach the problem, you’re not alone. Forum One partners with local governments, federal agencies, and nonprofits to design approaches that enhance organizations’ IT infrastructure by increasing efficiency, opening new data analytics possibilities, connecting systems, and reducing cost.
Cloud engineering: the big picture
Organizations partner with Forum One for cloud architecture: essentially a roadmap of your entire IT ecosystem and how overlapping, integrated cloud services and storage can help your operations run smoothly, securely and efficiently.
Like all our work, this starts with understanding your mission and capacity. What cloud services are you already using? What reports or analyses are you running on your data? What’s your in-house technical capacity to design and manage IT? What goals do you have for data and operations that you haven’t yet achieved?
With that understanding, we advise on systems design and explain the technical requirements for cloud-based applications, with strategic guidance for implementation, security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost.
For example, we helped Baltimore County augment their current staff to architect a migration of their site from on-premise hosting to AWS. Working with their team, we designed the hosting platform to exactly match their needs and requirements. We also created a new CI/CD pipeline customized to the new platform with a number of automated code quality checks.
Putting a plan into action
With architecture in place, Forum One can augment in-house staff capacity to build out and engineer solutions that serve your organization long term. Most often, we work side-by-side with organizations’ existing IT leadership and staff to customize operations that are then managed internally day-to-day.
Major data migrations or infrastructure upgrades help our partners realize the big-picture plans they’ve worked to design.
For example, we helped a major federal agency evaluate options for migration from on-premise to cloud, eventually picking an AWS environment since it most completely met their requirements for FedRAMP and other compliance needs. We developed an AWS solution in conjunction with their teams and vendors and have maintained it collaboratively for a few years, growing and customizing the infrastructure to meet evolving needs.
Results that amplify your impact
Moving to the cloud isn’t just the way technology is heading, or a simple replacement for warehoused data storage or installed software. For organizations providing services or even simply fundraising, cloud services can make a real difference in the way sensitive data is secured and ensure that your operations can keep running. And as more and more organizations operate remotely, relying on a decentralized cloud that anyone can access from anywhere reduces reliance on staff location and real estate.
Optimized, real-time data from integrated systems can also help mission-driven organizations make better, data-informed decisions. Native machine learning services integrated into AWS can open access to previously inaccessible business intelligence.
Ready to reexamine how the cloud can work for you? We’d love to hear from you: inquiries@forumone.com.
