Rackspace Professional Services
Rackspace Professional Services are designed to make organizations more agile, more quickly. Whether you are optimizing your continuous delivery pipeline, embarking on a high profile migration or advancing your cloud capabilities, our practical consultative approach helps businesses design and deliver meaningful change.
Assessment & Strategy
You want to adopt and consume new technology at the optimal price and performance level. And you need it to deliver value quickly. But to make that happen, you need the right technology strategy, stakeholder engagement across the business, and a structured, successful approach to business change. Our advisory and delivery consultants are on hand to guide your business approach to technology adoption. We’ll engage your stakeholders to build the case for change, set clear expectations, and present strategic options based on high-level technical and business analysis.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Help define the role of the technology and what it should deliver for the customer | An unbiased perspective on the right adoption strategy for the customer’s organization |
| Review the current service model to assess operational readiness | A service-driven approach to consumption and guiding principles that govern its use |
| Identify and engage key stakeholders, aligning business and technology units | Implement an organization policy for stakeholders across the business to buy into ‘the why’ |
| Translate the customer’s business requirements into technical specifications | An enterprise architecture view of the future |
| Profile the application landscape to understand the impact of change | A clear understanding of the costs and benefits contributing to your ROI |
Capabilities
Cloud Strategy Assessment
Built on Rackspace’s expertise across on-premise and all leading public and private clouds, we offer in-depth guidance and best practices for accelerating your cloud transformation ,setting out a clear strategy for your business that includes gap and feasibility analysis, cloud maturity assessments (including people, processes, and technology), and defined transformation planning.
Cloud Readiness Assessment
Most organizations realize the benefits of cloud but struggle to develop a concise roadmap with the clarity and applicable steps required to get the most value from their cloud adoption. With a Cloud Readiness Assessment from Rackspace, our experts complete an unbiased analysis of your workloads using multiple cost, security and performance variables to provide you with a practical and data-driven recommendation and roadmap for moving workloads to the cloud.
Cloud Decision Maker
Based on years of deploying and managing clouds at scale for customers, we help remove subjectivity and ambiguity from your platform choices. Our consulting architects apply a battle-tested structured assessment approach, to determine which cloud platform(s) and services best fit your overall cloud adoption strategy and business.
Cloud Adoption Blueprint
A practical consulting engagement that helps define what cloud should deliver for the customer’s business. Rackspace experts collaborate with the organization’s in-house team to design a high-level strategy that contrasts current state with the organization’s cloud vision, outlining impact, timelines, risks, costs and architectural and resource considerations.
Cloud Transformation Foundations
Rackspace experts collaborate with customers to assess and develop core capabilities across governance, service management and architecture, setting realistic cloud objectives and designing an operational roadmap that makes sense in the context of the organization’s business.
Technology Profiling
Business infrastructures are continually changing and its not uncommon for organizations to lose accurate visibility of their IT estate. The Technology Profiling service helps organizations discover, clarify and document the relevant characteristics of their infrastructure, application and services in the context of their business as they prepare for change.
Load Testing
Rackspace Load Testing identifies site and application weaknesses under stress, and then provides remediation recommendations to help maximize performance.
Vendor Selection
Our experts guide a customer’s evaluation of vendors and in-house options to help contribute to or execute their solution. We assist in leveraging the solution design to conduct a cost benefit analysis of different vendors and in-house options, engaging with the users to determine vendor fit from a technical and cultural aspect, providing insights from other clients and offering a final recommendation on vendor options.
Process Transformation
While many organizations spend an enormous amount of money on the technology aspects of their application modernization, few take the time to look at the processes that drive the technology. Rackspace Business Process Transformation services apply our functional expertise to refine and develop processes aligned to the customer’s business goals — helping to shorten timelines, increase capabilities and maximize application effectiveness. Our experts will evaluate the current business processes, align them to the business objectives, and define and implement future state processes.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Review business objectives and compare them to current results | Updated processes to support the new business model and technical capabilities |
| Review the current organization (operating model, processes, culture, skillset) and benchmark them versus industry standards | Reduced risk in process execution based on industry expertise and best practices |
| Identify shortfalls and areas for process improvement | Increased focus, with a prioritized list of challenges that need to be addressed |
| Outline a set of initiatives the organization can pursue to better achieve their business objectives | An initiative roadmap focused on driving quick wins and return on investment |
| Implement new processes, train staff, and ensure functionality | Improved application adoption rates |
Capabilities
Business Process Assessment
Our Rackspace industry consultants, process engineers and solutions and technology architects leverage best practices to conduct a full business process review to evaluate the customer’s current state and identify pain points, determine future-state processes that align with both business goals and technology goals, and recommend supporting technology and an architecture that fits those new processes.
Process Transformation Services
Once we have identified process improvement opportunities our experts will implement the new processes, align with technology, train staff and ensure functionality.
Migration Services
Rackspace specialists in application migration services migrate business services however they’re constructed or hosted, based on a deep understanding of the customer’s business needs. We create a comprehensive success program for application migrations, following a proven framework. We profile the customer’s application landscape, determine the appropriate migration strategy for each application, design the target architecture then plan and execute the transition into a new stable state. We help the customer build confidence and momentum with an industrialized migration factory approach that leverages our best practice blueprints to create appropriate workflows, workbenches and quality controls. Using automation where possible, we help establish a sustainable rate of change. Rackspace can support any migration strategy — Lift & Shift, DevOps, Application, and Built from Scratch — and migrate into IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms with minimum disruption, all while tailoring the plan to the business needs.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Profile the application landscape and user stories | Planning is built on the customer’s business context and user requirements |
| Collaborate to define the customer’s optimal target state | Stakeholder alignment and knowledge sharing - customer ownership of the journey |
| Identify good candidate applications for the first transition | Expert direction that creates program confidence and momentum |
| Apply our service factory methodology | Develop a repeatable, robust, and rapid approach to migration |
| Take the customer through to production stability and continuity in their new environment | Shared responsibility for successful delivery |
Capabilities
Migration Strategy & Profiling
Following a proven migration factory framework, our team examines the application estate, agrees those that are to be migrated, the high level migration principles and indicative migration strategies.
Migration Planning & Design
Detail planning of the migration of each application including the landing zone design, future state service management, test cases, change management process and migration schedule.
Migration Execution
A dedicated technical consultant, project manager and consulting engineer are assigned to the project to execute the comprehensive migration plan, including preparation of the migration environment, cut-over and go-live procedures, a post-migration validation of applications, data and network accessibility and support optimization.
First Mover
The First Movers service compresses a single workload migration into one expertly-designed and executed sprint, building the customer’s business’ confidence that migrating to the cloud can be manageable, cost effective and deliver a strong ROI.
Architecture & Design
Whether by design or by default, many enterprises now rely on multiple cloud platforms and a wide variety of cloud native services. Although this diversity creates opportunities for enhancing innovation and efficiency, it can be challenging to optimize performance, cost, security and ROI across this ecosystem. Rackspace architects take an agnostic architecture perspective to designing your frameworks and environments — so you can be sure you are getting the most out the complex, evolving hybrid cloud market. Rackspace also offers application architecture designs to provide our customers with a detailed plan of their application implementation and data migration. Our deep cloud and application experience makes Rackspace the ideal architecture partner, designing frameworks and environments that help prioritize ongoing optimization, continuous improvement and ease of management.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Identify the specific business drivers behind the customer’s architectural decisions | An enterprise architecture approach aligned to the customer’s business strategy |
| Support their initiatives with technical architecture and engineering services | Consistent, high-quality design and build services that accelerate their outcome delivery |
| Accurate cost modeling for their target operating architecture | Informed business cases that de-risk adoption and reduce risk and uncertainty |
| Establish architectural principles that work for their business | Clear guidance and decision-making confidence with the ability to manage diversity effectively |
| Deliver vendor-aligned architecture reviews and classify workloads | Stay on top of emerging best practices and optimal performance |
| Scope of application implementation and data migration | A detailed path forward that outlines their entire application implementation |
Capabilities
Architecture Assessment & Vision
Review existing architecture in the context of desired business objectives to produce a vision for the adoption of cloud
Application Architecture Design
Delivering customized architecture designs to meet the customers reliability, scalability and requirements across your systems to provide you with application and data migration proposals.
Cloud Architecture Design
The Rackspace team will explain and establish architecture principles with the organization’s team, perform a gap analysis, complete a workload classification exercise then design the target cloud architecture and roadmap based on current and future business needs for cloud services.
Cloud Architecture Roadmap
Expert architects will review the organization’s current Business IT estate to evaluate the current vision, architecture and overall technical objectives to create a detailed 6-12-24 month roadmap.
Cloud Comparison & Decision
Rackspace will review existing or target estates to compare implementations of public/private/hybrid solutions versus major cloud service providers and develop a functional cost comparison to help the customer make the optimum choice for their applications and business goals.
Best Practice Review
Seasoned experts will review the customer’s use of public cloud services against the relevant providers best practices and industry norms and develop actionable recommendations to guide and assist the customer in remediation efforts.
Application Implementation
Whether you need help supporting your packaged applications on the right infrastructure or you need implementation services for your SaaS platforms, Rackspace has experts that can accelerate your time to value. Our infrastructure team can provide you with subject matter expertise and create deployment plans that accelerate your time to value. Our certified platform experts can take your SaaS platform to the next level by configuring, customizing and developing your application to align with your business processes.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Application installation on-premise or in the cloud using best practices on the target deployment environment | A custom engineered solution installed in less time |
| Configure applications to deliver optimized performance and environment interoperability | Continuity of application operations before, during, and after the installation and configuration |
| Configure SaaS applications to fit organizational requirements | Using out-of-the-box capabilities, the customer gets a solution configured for their business |
| Customize SaaS applications workflows to align with business processes | Customized features and extensions of the platform made specifically to fit the needs of their business |
| Test the installation and configuration by using documented playbooks and best practices | Ensuring the application performs as expected and meets their business objectives |
Capabilities
Application Configuration
Rackspace experts can install customer’s applications on the infrastructure that is best suited using proven best practices as well as configure the application whether it is hosted or SaaS.
Application Customization
We look at the customer’s current application, business process and user workflow to find the best ways to customize their applications.
Greenfield Implementation
Experts help connect to or develop new modules and capabilities on any platform to ensure a faster return on new investments.
Application Modernization
Forward-looking organizations understand the real promise of application modernization: delivering differentiated business value. By transforming the application environment, you gain greater efficiency, agility, scalability and interoperability. But, application modernization is more than just technology. It requires a comprehensive approach that aligns to business outcomes, examines the current IT environment, assesses the gaps and develops a customized, process-led plan. Rackspace can help you realize the benefits of application modernization and get the most out of those technologies.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Deep dive review of the process and technology (assess current state of applications) to identify opportunities for optimization | Business processes are redesigned first, so that any new applications will support how the organization needs to operate |
| Assess the application portfolio to determine which applications need to be updated, replaced, retired, or consolidated | Savings on application operating costs |
| Design an architecture and solution roadmap | Greater efficiency by eliminating redundant and obsolete systems and updating critical applications |
| Based on the solution roadmap, conduct deep application workload assessments to determine system requirements | A clear, actionable solution blueprint based on cloud expertise and ready for fast implementation |
Capabilities
Application Portfolio Rationalization
Rackspace experts will do a deep dive review of the process and application portfolio to determine which applications need to be updated, replaced, retired or consolidated and they design a solution roadmap based on their findings.
Application Development
We assess the customer’s current application landscape and customize it to be cloud-ready.
In-depth Application Analysis
Our experts deep dive into a specific application to determine the gaps in current functionality and any remediation or migration requirements.
DevOps Transformation
Continuously improving business capabilities is fundamental to growth and competitive advantage. By adopting a software-led, automated approach to integrating business, operations and development, a customer gains the ability to iterate and evolve sustainably and more importantly at pace. Our consulting and engineering experts work with customers to design, implement and accelerate their adoption of strong engineering practices that prioritize the reusability of software assets and the observability of running systems.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Accelerate the customer’s ability to automate the orchestration and management of cloud infrastructure | Making the customer’s operations a seamless fabric with an infrastructure-as-software approach |
| Create and enhance software delivery pipelines and processes | Transform their change cadence with efficient, streamlined, and simplified methods for pushing application changes into production |
| Embed best-practice approaches to cloud native capabilities, including microservices, continuous deliver, and containers | Enable their teams to rapidly enhance knowledge and capabilities, and create a vision for the future |
| System, platform, and toolset profiling to design the best fit for the customer’s business | Accelerate developer maturity with the right toolchain decisions and the ability to audit, monitor, trace, and gain visibility into systems |
| Analyze existing systems to determine gaps and suitability for growth | Simplify and resolve complex system challenges |
Capabilities
Container Enablement
Rackspace Consultants assess the customer’s application portfolio and deploy a container solution based on best practice methods that have been tested and refined with a complete deployment automation package.
DevOps Consulting
Through a series of consultations, Rackspace will assess the customer’s DevOps state (including business objectives, application architecture, delivery process, organizational culture and monitoring capabilities), identifying a target future state and helping them build a strategy for reaching it.
DevOps Engineering
DevOps engineering specialists at Rackspace will implement new tools and methodologies side by-side with the customer’s team to provide practical solutions for resource provisioning, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and automated application performance monitoring.
CloudOps Transformation
Processes, SLAs and KPIs associated with running cloud operations are very different from those required to deliver the same services from traditional infrastructure - our Service Management consultants help customers evolve their cloud operating model. We take a proactive approach to modernizing their strategy for service management in the cloud - so they can work more effectively and ultimately improve their end-user experience.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Assess the customer’s current operating environment, processes, and capabilities to create their operational baseline | A clear picture of the customer’s current operational capabilities as a baseline for success and measuring progress |
| Develop a target operating model, aligned with their strategic objectives and value proposition | A modern service management approach that enables a quicker business change cadence |
| Design a service catalogue in collaboration with their operational teams | A unified view of their services that profiles service priority and criticality, outlining use cases and automation opportunities |
| Implement a Service Management Office | A sound governance approach that prioritizes continual service improvement with the flexibility to accommodate change |
| Assess readiness and enable their change implementation | De-risk their transformation with the support of certified service management professionals, safeguarding their reputation, brand, and revenue |
Capabilities
Operational Baseline
We assess the customer’s current service management state and baseline their operational processes.
Target Operating Model
Rackspace service management consultants design the target operating model and service management office, scoping the impact these changes will have on the organization.
Service Catalogue
Our consultants design and build the customer’s service catalogue outlining the use cases with the organization and identifying automation opportunities.
Organizational Change Management
We audit and review organizational readiness and launch preparations and implement an organization change plan including related communications and reporting.
Service Transition
We scope and baseline the customer’s current service management process, design the service onboarding and manage acceptance into Rackspace’s managed services operation.
Integration Services
Organizations today rely on hundreds of cloud and on-premise applications, tools and databases — and not surprisingly, integrating them is complex and time consuming, making it one of the biggest business and technology challenges facing organizations today. Rackspace has the expertise to provide our customers with a long-term, dynamic and scalable integration strategy. We help you accelerate application and data integration connected through APIs, on-premises or in the cloud to unlock new revenue channels, improve customer experiences, drive innovation and deliver strong business results.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Build custom APIs, adding APIs from exchange and partner network | Improved data integration to drive more actionable decisions |
| Build a center of enablement to provide access to the organization and to partners for reuse of APIs | The ability to share data within, across, and outside the organization–increasing speed to market |
| Create an application network by connecting applications, data, and devices–on-premises and in the cloud | A foundation for great efficiency, agility, scalability, and interoperability across legacy and SaaS applications |
| Ongoing API management: optimizing the amount of cores, identifying new APIs, monitoring systems and connectors | Continue the ability to focus on innovation, while Rackspace helps manage your integrations |
Capabilities
Integration and API Management Assessment
Rackspace experts will evaluate the current state of software integration across your entire organization by looking closely at the data, processes and applications supporting them. We provide application integration recommendations that align with your organization’s overall goals and strategies.
Integration Services
Rackspace experts will help create critical connections between your systems and data to give the needed insight to run your business more effectively and to provide an exceptional experience.
API Management Services
Rackspace experts will create and publish APIs and monitor their performance over time.
Data Modernization
Data analytics technologies make valuable information accessible across your organization. They introduce new architectural patterns, application models and operational requirements within a rapidly evolving technical ecosystem, all of which create challenges in designing and configuring a reliable and scalable analytics environment. Rackspace helps customers transform how they collect, process and store data, while helping to ensure proper system integration and enabling their organization to make data-driven decisions.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Identify the customer’s business, data, application, and operational requirements | A data analysis strategy and architecture that is specific to the customer’s objectives |
| Design target database, transaction, and infrastructure solutions and report gaps | Detailed architectural plan to create or validate their data analytics strategy |
| Complex data migration through a reliable data pipeline and data integration points | Reduced migration risk with reliable data ingestion and endpoints |
| Design and implementation of data stores | Data modeling, persistence, and processing based on their requirements |
| Configuration of security, role-based access control, disaster recovery, and backups | Optimization and increased security of their data analytics platform |
Capabilities
Modern Data Architecture Assessment
Rackspace’s cloud-agnostic team assesses the customer’s current systems, identifies their business objectives and designs their ideal future-state reference data architecture. Customers receive a roadmap that accounts for future data management, analytics and AI/machine learning workloads.
Big Data Analytics Accelerator
An end-to-end solution that implements a working big data, NoSQL or cloud analytics platform that includes all the key facets of a modern data platform. The Rackspace data modernization team delivers big data application development and integration services for the entire project lifecycle; from planning, design and development to support and operations of the platform and underlying IaaS.
Training & Adoption
Customers seeking to gain fast application adoption in their user base can opt for Rackspace developed and delivered training workshops targeted to specific application workloads or solutions.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| UAT Training for application super users | Create super users in the customer’s organization who understand the system inside and out |
| Workshops designed for application trainers, administrators, business leaders, and end-users | A customized training plan for their application instance rolled out to all functional rolls |
| Establish activity-based reporting to help customers track application usage and actions | Metrics and insights to see how users are adopting the new technology |
Capabilities
Process and Application Training
Training for User Acceptance Testing, Train the Trainer Workshop, System Administrator Workshop, Business Leader Dashboard and Reporting Workshop.
Application Success and Adoption
End-user workshops designed to help employees successfully adopt an application so that the customer can increase efficiency and ROI.
Activity Reporting
Rackspace experts establish activity reporting to give the customer insights on application adoption.
Security & Governance
Security threats will always outpace compliance requirements, so approaching the two disciplines in parallel is essential to the big picture. Compliance alone isn’t enough to keep an organization secure, and security doesn’t always assure compliance. Regardless of availability of in-house security expertise, organizations need continual security monitoring to assess and remediate vulnerabilities in their current IT and to ensure new architectures are protected from external threats. Rackspace security experts take an active approach to securing the customer’s cloud and applications and strengthening their overall IT network security posture to remove or minimize impact.
| What we do | What it means for our customers |
|---|---|
| Assess the customer’s infrastructure, application, data, and security posture | An expert and unbiased risk and security analysis of the customer’s IT portfolio |
| Identify gaps in reaching compliance and security standards | A detailed report of areas where the IT footprint will not meet regulatory requirements or where security vulnerabilities are identified |
| Remediation and security planning roadmap | A prioritized, structured, and proactive plan for resolving risk and security vulnerabilities |
| Proactive Testing | Proactive identification of web and network vulnerabilities before hackers find them |
| Execute remediation efforts side-by-side with the customer’s team | Shared responsibility for successful delivery |
Capabilities
Penetration Testing
Vulnerability Scanning and Penetration testing for network and web applications that produces a vulnerability and remediation report.
Security & Risk Assessment
To help mitigate a customer’s risks, Rackspace Security & Risk Assessment service will evaluate their compliance with security frameworks, identify gaps, and provide recommendations to address any identified shortcomings.
Application Security Assessment
Rackspace’s Application Security Assessment evaluates a specific application’s security posture and provides remediation guidance.
Updated 12 months ago