Cloudify Advisors

Key Goals of Cloudify’s Professional Services:

MIGRATE

Migrate to Hybrid Cloud by adding our experts to your team

Virtual platforms architects and engineers

Certified AWS, Azure Cloud MCSE, and GCP Architects

Certified AWS, Azure Cloud MCSE , and GCP Engineers

Cloud security engineers

Cloud networking engineers

Fully Managed Cloud Services Staff, realize the promised savings in the Cloud

engagement summary

The Executives of the Information Technology Group and the Director of Infrastructure and Technology—at Client have requested that Cloudify provide a statement of work for a consultancy engagement.

The decision of where to host services and applications of an organization in the Cloud is a critical one, as it can impact many facets of the business services, including performance, availability, scaling, security, privacy, compliance, operations, staffing, and costs. Client is engaging Cloudify to perform a study to determine the optimal Cloud hosting solution for the organization.

Cloudify will provide a detailed analysis of a service bundle (made up of infrastructure, applications, network, interfaces, etc.) selected by the Client Executives. This will include both the business and technology requirements of Client. All relevant technology strategies, as well as security and compliance requirements of the organization will be gathered and studied in detail. The first outcome of this engagement will be the matrix showing three or more viable alternatives, and recommending one of them to implement and benefit from Hybrid IT. This will include the pros and cons for each option considered, as well as a financial comparison of ongoing costs. High level budget estimates will be provided for moving all other service bundles, services, and systems to this new Hybrid environment.

What Is a Well-Architected Review?

A Well-Architected Review:
  • Assesses a specific workload (e.g., an application or service) on the cloud.
  • Evaluates it against six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:
    • Operational Excellence
    • Security
    • Reliability
    • Performance Efficiency
    • Cost Optimization
    • Sustainability
  • Identifies “high-risk issues” (HRIs) that could lead to problems like outages, data breaches, or cost overruns.
  • Recommends best practices and improvements.

Value to Businesses

Improved Reliability and Availability Helps ensure workloads are designed for fault tolerance and disaster recovery.
Enhanced Security Identifies misconfigurations, access issues, and compliance gaps before they become vulnerabilities.
Optimized Performance Ensures resources are matched to workloads efficiently, improving speed and scalability.
Cost Efficiency Highlights underused or overprovisioned resources, helping reduce cloud spend.
Operational Excellence Encourages automation, monitoring, and continuous improvement in operations.
Sustainability Identifies ways to reduce the environmental impact of workloads through efficient use of compute resources.
Strategic Cloud Adoption Aligns IT and business goals by ensuring cloud infrastructure supports growth, agility, and innovation.
Risk Mitigation Proactively identifies and addresses issues before they impact business operations.
Vendor Support AWS and its partners often offer WARs at no cost, and sometimes provide credits or incentives for remediation.

Well-Architected Review Report

Workload Name: Acme Web App
Review Date: May 29, 2025
Reviewed By: John Doe, AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Customer Contact: Jane Smith, CTO, Acme Corp

  • Objective:
    Evaluate the Acme Web App against the AWS Well-Architected Framework to identify risks and improvement opportunities.

    Key Findings:

    • 5 High-Risk Issues (HRIs)
    • 8 Medium-Risk Issues
    • Opportunities for 20% cost savings
    • Strong performance but lacking in operational monitoring and security controls

    Business Impact:
    Addressing these issues will improve uptime, reduce cloud costs by ~$3,000/month, and increase security posture to align with industry best practices.

  • Workload Name: Acme Web App
  • Environment: Production
  • Primary Services Used: EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, IAM, CloudWatch
  • Region: us-east-1
  • Business Function: Customer-facing e-commerce platform
  • Compliance Requirements: PCI-DSS, GDPR
  • Operational Excellence

    • HRI: No automated rollback for failed deployments
    • Recommendation: Implement CI/CD pipeline with rollback and monitoring via AWS CodePipeline and CloudWatch
    • Score: 5/10

    Security

    • HRI: Over-permissive IAM roles; no MFA enforcement
    • Recommendation: Audit and minimize IAM permissions, enforce MFA for all users
    • Score: 4/10

    Reliability

    • Issue: No multi-AZ deployment for RDS
    • Recommendation: Enable Multi-AZ for high availability
    • Score: 6/10

    Performance Efficiency

    • Observation: EC2 instances oversized
    • Recommendation: Right-size instances using Compute Optimizer
    • Score: 7/10

    Cost Optimization

    • HRI: Idle development resources running 24/7
    • Recommendation: Implement scheduling to shut down unused resources
    • Score: 5/10

    Sustainability

    • Observation: Unused EBS volumes not cleaned up
    • Recommendation: Use automation to clean up and monitor storage usage

    Score: 6/10

Pillar Description Impact Level Recommendation Owner Target Date
Security IAM roles too broad High Refactor using least privilege principle Jane Smith 2025-06-15
Operational Excellence No rollback mechanism for failed deployments High CI/CD pipeline + monitoring DevOps Team 2025-06-10
Cost Optimization Idle EC2/RDS instances in dev High Set up auto-scheduling IT Ops 2025-06-20
Security MFA not enforced High Enforce MFA for all IAM users Security Team 2025-06-12
Reliability RDS not in Multi-AZ High Enable Multi-AZ DBA Team 2025-06-18
  • Prioritize HRI resolution within the next 30 days
  • Schedule bi-weekly check-ins to track progress
  • Consider Well-Architected Tool in AWS Console to track improvements
  • Detailed risk mapping spreadsheet
  • Screenshots from Well-Architected Tool
  • Cost optimization simulation results (Compute Optimizer & Trusted Advisor)
  • Assign ownership for remediation actions
  • Schedule follow-up WAR in 90 days
  • Consider formalizing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)