Gain a fresh perspective from a senior cloud engineer with validated certifications and deep expertise. After months of preparation, stakeholder engagement, and training, an expert review helps optimize cost, security, and reliability before going live.

At Akkodis, we've embraced Well-Architected cloud engineering principles as the foundation of our global practice since 2014. We guide our cloud engineers toward senior roles, with many striving to become Senior Cloud Architects—validated by certifications, specialized training, and hands-on experience optimizing client workloads.

Cloud has dominated the IT industry for nearly two decades, with countless individuals and organizations jumping on the bandwagon, often claiming expertise. But true cloud expertise requires staying ahead of its rapid evolution. The pace of innovation far exceeds that of traditional pre-cloud environments, and an organization's ability to keep up depends on its willingness to embrace continuous improvement.

Too often, CIOs focus on minimizing change, cutting labor costs, and investing in third-party tools without properly equipping teams to use them. Many optimize for short-term financial gains, hitting annual targets before moving on—leaving behind mounting tech debt. By the time security breaches, compliance failures, or market disruption expose the cracks, the damage is costly and time-consuming to fix.

Strong leadership looks beyond the next quarter and invests in the long-term operating environment. Many cloud migrations fail not because of poor technology but because organizations do the bare minimum now and never follow through on the promised "Phase 2." Success comes from committing to the best long-term outcome from the start.

Continuous Patching: Enhancing Security and Operational Efficiency in the Cloud

Today, many applications are web or browser-based, whether for internal staff use or client interactions. Securing these applications is critical. While security has multiple layers, a key requirement in industry standards and government regulations is applying patches and updates quickly to mitigate risks.

Securing these applications is critical. While security has multiple layers, a key requirement in industry standards and government regulations is applying patches and updates quickly to mitigate risks

So, what are the labor costs, reliability, and time required to implement this update? How can you make even a small change as cost-effective, thoroughly tested, and quickly deployed as possible?

Some organizations update their production application environments infrequently, bundling multiple changes into a single "big bang" release. However, any failure in this process can trigger a large-scale rollback, further delaying critical security patches and system updates.

Maximizing Efficiency with Continuous Delivery and Automated Updates 

A much better approach is to implement smaller, more frequent updates through continuous delivery. While this minimizes the risk of each update, it can increase labor costs. To mitigate this, we use automation through scripting and templated deployments, reducing manual effort. By leveraging version control and DevOps pipelines, we streamline deployment, ensuring efficiency and consistency.

For example, consider a Java application running on a traditional application server. The Java runtime has likely evolved since the initial deployment. What are the project costs and complexities of updating the Java runtime with a minor version upgrade (e.g., 8.0.101, released September 19, 2016, to 8.0.431, released October 15, 2024)? In most cases, this update doesn’t require any changes to your application code.

But Java 8 stopped receiving public updates from Oracle in 2019, and by now, you should be upgrading to Java 21 (LTS – Long-Term Support) for better security and performance. The same applies to other critical components, such as a PostgreSQL 9.5 database or outdated TLS (formerly SSL) configurations that no longer meet PCI DSS compliance standards.

The ability to make agile, incremental changes is a core principle of the Operational Excellence pillar in the Cloud Well-Architected Framework. Automating deployments to ensure low-cost, uniform updates with minimal downtime allow organizations to quickly implement security and functionality enhancements.

Additionally, standardizing the way these updates are orchestrated across applications ensures that your engineering team's skills remain repeatable and scalable, improving efficiency and long-term cloud success.

Balancing Cloud Costs and Security: A Smarter Approach to the Well-Architected Framework

The naive approach to the 6 pillars of well architected is to prioritize and position cloud cost as the number one concern.

However, with today’s environment of penalties derived from security breaches, things like GDPR fines with penalties “up to €20 million, or up to 4% of their annual global turnover, whichever is greater” means that security becomes paramount (to avoid this penalty cost).

In my experience this is a balanced play-off. The worst thing you can do is to stick your head in the sand and ignore it all and simply minimize the short-term costs in a traditional “lights on” support methodology.

What cloud security failures can you point at that can be avoided?

We don’t like to publicly highlight any security incidents; they are all painful for the individuals and organizations involved. Many organizations come to us after they have had such an incident, and for them we have just one wish: please come to us before you have such an incident.

Optimizing Cloud Costs and Avoiding Hidden Expenses with Expert Review

As cost is always an area of review, our experienced engineers often find meaning full places where cost can be optimized, particularly on older workloads, and those workloads that have not had deep expert management and updates. 

We once identified a client running SAS Analytics on Amazon EC2 m3.8x large instances running 24x7, which had been locked away under a Reservation for 3 years. This reservation had expired, and they hadn’t taken any action to further optimize the cost. They had not updated the RedHat 7.3 installed operating system, but they had updated the SAS Analytics runtimes.

They had two major choices:

1. Lock a new reservation
2. Move to a newer instance family (which runs at a cheaper cost and is faster), and then lock in a new reservation

That short-term optimization of no OS upgrades was now a financial penalty: instead of a 65% cost saving, they could only secure a 30% cost saving. They were spending an extra US$100,000 per year because of this one item, but their IT team did not see this.

Unfortunately, they had not updated their installed OS above RedHat 7.5, which precluded them from doing step #2 above immediately. That short-term optimization of no OS upgrades was now a financial penalty: instead of a 65% cost saving, they could only secure a 30% cost saving. They were spending an extra US$100,000 per year because of this one item, but their IT team did not see this.

This is where expertise comes in, and the cost of that expertise needs to be less than the one-year cost savings. We often find that the cost of doing a Well-Architected Framework Review is dwarfed by the potential cost savings identified. The biggest challenge is not the budget, but how quickly you can get Akkodis to help you. Because time is money when the cloud billing machine is running.

Why Regular Cloud Reviews Are Essential for Continuous Optimization and DevOps Efficiency

These reviews serve as a point in time status check; repeating this may expose the rate of improvement or regression, as well as picking up on new transgressions or optimization improvements that were not possible 12 months ago. Workloads that are not running under a DevOps management approach with continual review and innovation would benefit from an annual review (or more frequently).

Akkodis Cloud Expertise Trusted by Global Enterprises and Government Sectors

Akkodis has concentrated on excellence in the Cloud since the early 2010s, servicing law enforcement, government, and enterprise across many countries. Akkodis has had various cloud vendors recognize this expertise with Competency and Service Delivery awards. Our engineers have focused on deep technical skills and working closely with the hyper scalar cloud vendors to innovate and improve their offerings, to reduce friction and improve the cloud services for all workload types. 

Akkodis maintains expertise across several of the world’s largest hyper scalar vendors, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure & Power Platform, Google GCP, and Huawei cloud. Akkodis team architects, implements and operates these environments for our clients, often over the long term. 

Several of our cloud team members hold national security clearances, to service deep parts of defense and national security. This deep capability and trust mean that Akkodis is your reliable service provider.

Not only can we use our engineers to review and provide you with recommendations for improvement, but separately we can help remediate the items with or for you. Our series under the Well Architected Framework reviews can help you with further information. 

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