4 Weeks

Solution Areas:

Cloud

Have more questions about "Well-architected framework audit" package?

    Well-architected framework audit

    Evaluate your cloud architecture against the five principles of a well-architected framework.

    In this 4-week engagement, our team audits your cloud applications to ensure they comply with the "Well-Architected Framework" as laid out by industry giants including Microsoft and Amazon. These five principles of a "Well-Architected Framework" are:

    • Reliability
    • Cost optimization
    • Operational excellence
    • Security
    • Performance efficiency


    Engagement process:
    Each principle of the framework is benchmarked against the best practices of the framework and includes the following:

    • Audit scope: Audit scope: What is covered in the audit of the particular principle
    • What we will do: Activities that our team will perform
    • Deliverables: Expected end results after the completion of engagement


    1. Reliability
    Benefits of evaluating your cloud application for reliability:

    • Build workloads with confidence using proven practices.
    • Actionable and simple to use deep technical resources to design workloads that show results.
    • Know where to focus to optimize your workloads.

    Audit scope:

    • Applications or workloads built on the Azure/AWS platform.
    • Optional capabilities enabled on the app’s cloud platform (high availability, disaster recovery, backup, etc.).

    What we will do:

    • A comprehensive review of an existing application or proposed design to identify critical reliability optimizations.
    • Assessment topics range from Compute, Data and Networking to DevOps, filtered through a reliability lens.

    Deliverables:

    • Inventory of key risks to application reliability.
    • Actionable, prioritized recommendations to address risks.
    • Comprehensive reliability report.
    • Guidance for implementing critical near-term recommendations.


    2. Cost optimization
    Benefits of evaluating your cloud application for cost optimization:

    • Monitor costs and usage continuously.
    • Better identify unused and orphaned resources.
    • Structured billing management.
    • Leadership support for proper budget allocation.

    Audit scope:

    • Organizational structure.
    • Architectural framework.
    • Tactical strategies.

    What we will do:

    • Research and forecast costs.
      • Monitor bills, set budgets, and allocate spending to teams and projects.
      • Forecast costs for the future investments.
    • Cost optimize workloads.
      • Optimize your resources.
      • Follow best practices for workload design.
      • Identify savings through cloud offers and licensing terms.
    • Develop spending guidelines.
      • Establish spending objectives and policies.
      • Implement cost controls for easier compliance by teams.
    • Monitor usage and spending.
      • Set up budget alerts, credit alerts, and departmental quota alerts.
    • Set up Auto-Scaling.
    • Set up reserved instances.

    Deliverables:

    • Understand and forecast costs.
    • Optimized resource usage.
    • Implement best practices for workload design.
    • Establish spending objectives and policies so teams can go faster while complying with policies.
    • Identify costly mistakes.
    • Actionable, prioritized recommendations to address cost-incurring oversights.
    • Reduced expenses and losses.


    3. Operational excellence
    Benefits of evaluating your cloud application for operational excellence:

    • Create agile and accurate processes.
    • Implement focused and assertive app monitoring.
    • Establish plans for continuous improvement.

    Audit scope:

    • Process agility.
    • Automation frameworks.
    • DevOps framework.
    • Testing strategies (automated and manual).
    • CI/CD pipelines.

    What we will do:

    • Comprehensive end-to-end review of an existing application or proposed design to identify critical operational optimization gaps.
    • Covers a range of technical topics from Compute, Data and Networking to DevOps.
    • Assessment to identify critical risks to the ability to effectively operate an application.
    • Deliver prioritized and actionable recommendations to address each area of concern.

    Deliverables:

    • Inventory of key risks to application operability.
    • Actionable, prioritized recommendations to address risks.
    • Comprehensive operational excellence report.
    • Guidance for implementing critical short-term recommendations.


    4. Security
    Benefits of evaluating your cloud application for security:

    • Build on a secure foundation.
    • Proactively stay secure with native controls.
    • Detect and respond to threats.

    Audit scope:

    • Security and encryption policies.
    • Security frameworks like Zero-trust.
    • Recovery strategies.
    • IAM and data protection policies.

    What we will do:

    • Secure the foundation:
      • We design the security architecture assuming workload failure with multi-layer protection controls.
      • Build every logic using Zero-Trust principles.
      • Embrace Azure/AWS's security investments, resources, and compliance certifications.
    • Build proactive security measures.
      • Continuous monitoring through a centralized security center.
      • Cloud native web application firewalls.
      • Identity access management tools deployed at every layer.
    • Detection and response.
      • Leverage large-scale intelligence collected over decades as a data set to evaluate threats against effectively.
      • Implement automatic threat protection with tools like Azure Defender on the public cloud.
      • Establish procedures to identify and mitigate threats for workloads.

    Deliverables:

    • Secure foundation built with multi-layer protection controls.
    • Central security monitoring dashboard.
    • Cloud firewall policies
    • IAM policies.
    • Threat intelligence-based security automation.
    • Threat mitigation and identification procedure establishment.
    • Protection framework comprising of:
      • DDoS protection
      • Web Application Firewall
      • Network security groups


    5. Performance Efficiency
    Benefits of evaluating your cloud application for performance efficiency:

    • Design efficient systems.
    • Monitor processes.
    • Optimize resources.
    • Manage resource scaling.
    • Improve network and storage.
    • Design parts to be discrete and decomposable.
    • Evaluate workload health levels.

    Audit scope:

    • Load testing in pre-production.
    • Predicting failure under various levels of load.

    What we will do:

    • Optimal service execution:
      • Test Continuously to establish baseline for your app and its infra.
      • Test impact of changes on performance.
      • Understand your typical of peak loads.
    • Anticipate and prepare for load fluctuations:
      • Test for expected loads due to planned events.
      • Plan for unexpected events that can cause heavy loads.
    • Carefully evaluate service and costs:
      • Review SLAs of similar services to determine best fit for your app.
      • Analyze business requirements impact due to trade-off between cost and performance.
      • Estimation of initial and operational costs.
    • Monitor:
      • Define comprehensive monitoring strategy to consider scalability, resilience and performance.
      • Use app telemetry and profiling to better identify issues.

    Deliverables:

    • Easy scalable resources.
    • Architecture trade-off policies based on Best Practices.
    • Health monitoring dashboards.
    • Prioritized app-health improvement recommendations.
    • Blueprint for handling expected and unexpected load.

    Pegasus One can help you excel at all 5 core principles of a Well-Architected solution. Your solution can be reliable, cost-optimized, efficient, secure and function as intended. Contact us today to know more.