We're excited that this is the first in several upcoming blog posts to start discussing in a bit more detail around the services ATLAS offers and helping our current and potential clients better understand what services we can offer, and the value we can bring to your business.

We are in the process of updating our website, and we are excited that our brand-new website will help better signpost and explain these offerings, but until then I wanted to share them with you here. If you're interested in working with us, then please do drop us an e-mail.

The team here at ATLAS have always had a firm understanding of the complex infrastructure requirements that have been needed to underpin some of our internal projects, and more recently that of our clients. Our team are currently skilled in a range of areas, including AWS, Azure, VMWare, Proxmox, Networking and more business focused areas such as capacity planning and system security risk management.

Our team also have a wide range of experience in a lot of the common business applications you would be running on your infrastructure, with extensive experience in Atlassian Tooling, DevOPS tools such as Jenkins, SonarQube, Nexus and Snyk to name a few, and a range of scripting languages & other tools to enable effective management of Infrastructure environments such as Terraform & Ansible.

Unlike a number of similar offerings you might find with other companies, we aren't tied into any vendors, and always aim to provide a solution that meets your technical needs in an effective way, and where we can we utilize existing resources and the associated skills and knowledge you already have within your organizations, as you'll read in the following case study.

Case Study

The ATLAS Team were approached by the Technical lead of a large online provider of cyber security training, who were looking to better optimize their AWS spend usage, as they believed while they had built an excellent system in-house, that there must have been some cost optimizations they could make to reduce the cost.

Our team started an initial conversation with the team to start to understand exactly what they're trying to achieve and how their current infrastructure was setup, and we very quickly realized why they had adopted this model. At the time they had started to provision into AWS, it gave them the exceptional flexibility that they could provision the lab environments for customers on demand and as a result meant they were not pre-provisioning or over-provisioning on their environment, and as a result saving a considerable amount of money at the time.

As this company has grown, they had found they would often have a consistent number of VM's that were in active use and provisioned, and they were also forecasting that this quantity of VM’s was likely to increase by a significant order of magnitude (Somewhere between 7 and 10 times their numbers when we started the conversation). With all of this in mind we suggested to do some more detailed analysis with the customer, identifying what regions in AWS infrastructure was being provisioned into, and investigate simple things like if pre-payment terms would be viable.

The other key take-away we had when we were working with this client is that adopting a hybrid cloud model and running a fleet of "On-Prem" VM's which would have resulted in a considerable cost saving for the client, while still maintaining the same level of service they had already come to expect. Our proposal was to stand up several physical servers in the same geographic regions that the service was receiving much of its predictable use-case and look to transition end-users from the AWS infrastructure on to a traditional data centre environment. This would give the benefit of a considerable cost saving to the customer, while also still allowing them to use AWS as part of their burst or generally less predictable traffic.

While this may sound like it's going against adopting a cloud-native way of doing things, it was the best solution for our customers’ requirements, they wanted to reduce their monthly costs, and this would see them a considerable long term reduction in cost, even though there would be a larger initial up front cost if they wanted to purchase their own hardware, though there are a number of dedicated server providers out there where they could have avoided the large up-front cost as well.

In this case our client eventually de-prioritised this work and we never had the opportunity to implement the model in practice, however the client was very satisfied with the work we did, and we hope as they grow, they will re-consider making this jump in order to save themselves expenditure in the longer term.

Time to work with us?

If you would like to have a chat with our team about our infrastructure services, be that supporting your move to the cloud, getting better value for money with your cloud spend, or anything else please do reach out to our team. We'd be more than happy to have a non-comital chat with you about what you're looking for, and to see if we're the right fit for each other.

All you need to do is drop our enquiries team an e-mail, at enquire@atlas-media.co.uk