Effective risk management : NIMBUS Methodology

When the companies decide to migrate the IT Infrastructure management to a 3rd party from in-house team or from the current managed service provider one of the key concerns that it faces is the impact during the transition on the business.

Would the business be impacted due to the transition? If it does, how to minimize the impact are the some of the key questions that the IT department would look for answers from the cloud infra service providers. Lack of clarity on the expectations and accountability of the stakeholders, adds to the risks and magnifies the impact on the business. 

Given that the knowledge and the context of the cloud infra shall be with the in-house team or the outgoing service provider, and the onus of successful transition rests on the incoming MS provider, the transition planning and the plan becomes the pivotal point for successful transition.  

To manage such transition, at 1CH we adopt the next-gen, robust transition methodology NIMBUS, which has been built based on the industry best practices and the experience from the multiple cloud infra transitions by 1CH. The methodology gathers data regarding the current state of infrastructure and the process adopted to arrive at the most optimal and viable transition plan. Some of the key focus areas that NIMBUS takes into consideration in creating the transition plans are : 

1. Complexity and Criticality: Key business applications, uptime requirement, inflight application development details etc.
2. Documentation: Design Documents, Process Documents, Application Dependencies, SLA requirements etc. 
3. Data: Ticket and Incident data, available SOP, Resource Utilization Data, Run book, metrics on SLA, etc. 
4. People: Details of the key people and their skills 
5. Geo-Locations: Location details of the resources, users and the customers 

The NIMBUS methodology uses the data provided to assess and identify the key risks that could possibly impact the transition and the business. Some of the key risks that are managed effectively during transition are  

1. Lack of clarity on accountability and responsibility of the teams involved 
2. Non-availability of SME or heavy dependency on SME during the transition activities 
3. Insufficient data / documents for some of the key components of infra / application  
4. Business team not being involved in the transition planning

With the collated data, a comprehensive and detailed transition plan with the scope, phases, timelines, governance plan, communication plan, accountability, RACI, critical path, resource plan with the calendar, key risks assessment plan with the mitigation actions, and key success factors shall be published to all stakeholders.  

The plan shall also list the phase-wise deliverables, measurement and checklist to ensure that the transition stays on track.  

The key benefits of adopting the NIMBUS methodology are 

1. Ability to preempt the potential risks that could impact the transition  
2. Leverage the industry best practices to mitigate the risks 
3. Comprehensively cover all the nuances of the transition.  
4. Ensure seamless and successful transition of cloud MS 

Do you want more details about Nimbus Methodology? Speak to our cloud consultant today