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Month: August 2020

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Announcements Digital

ARQ Group joins forces with NZ’s Enlighten Designs for new trans-Tasman digital partnership

ARQ Group and Enlighten Designs Trans-tasman partnership

ARQ Group joins forces with NZ’s Enlighten Designs for new trans-Tasman digital partnership

Mark Addy

Mark Addy

ARQ Group joins forces with NZ’s Enlighten Designs for new trans-Tasman digital partnership

Australia’s leading digital provider, ARQ Group signs a strategic partnership with Enlighten Designs, New Zealand’s leading software development and website design company as part of a new trans-Tasman alliance.  

The new partnership diversifies Enlighten’s data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence offering, thanks to ARQ’s in-house capabilities. In turn, Enlighten provides ARQ access to advanced web capabilities and its award-winning customised dashboard, uplifting ARQ Group’s customer experience.

Both ARQ and Enlighten have been collaborating for the past 12 months on innovative web and dashboarding solutions to improve accessibility to emerging digital technologies.

“Our strategic partnership presents an opportunity for both businesses to showcase our agile capabilities, despite the ongoing impacts of COVID-19.

“By unifying our expertise, we’re continuing the delivery of meaningful impact for our clients, locally and abroad. ARQ’s market leadership in data, digital, AI, and cloud-based solutions means that our customers have access to an expanded range of digital services.

“We’re 100% onshore, proudly Australian owned and operated. ARQ’s the name behind many of Australia’s most loved household brands and government projects. We’re passionate about leveraging technology to solve organisational challenges – both public and private – no matter how complex.” 

– ARQ Group CEO, Tristan Sternson

Sternson also has a warning for companies reluctant to embrace digital solutions to meet a rapidly changing operating environment.

“The world has changed forever. Companies failing to move ahead with their digital transformation projects as priority, will be left behind. In the new COVID climate, if you’re not part of the future, you’ll be left in the past. History has repetitively shown us countless examples of major companies at risk of collapse due to change-anxiety and the deadly head-in-the-sand syndrome, all the while their competitors are busy embracing change.

“We have built our expertise over 25 years, which is why the majority of the ASX’s top-20 companies and governments across Australia trust ARQ to develop their digital solutions. We’ve hired an additional 80 consultants in the past 3 months, and thanks to this partnership, ARQ Group continues to grow from strength to strength.”

– ARQ Group CEO, Tristan Sternson

Founder and CEO of Enlighten, Damon Kelly, says the strategic partnership will give the company access to new expertise, vital to growth.   

“We’re genuinely excited about our partnership with ARQ Group and the opportunity to expand into the Australian market. Our new alliance advances our technology offering for New Zealand customers and stakeholders. ARQ’s strong relationships, 25-year heritage, and proven capabilities across government agencies and large corporates is invaluable, enabling Enlighten to expand our technology solutions on a global scale.

“Our organisations are well-placed to take advantage of the post COVID-19 trans-Tasman bubble as soon as it’s established. In the meantime, our collaboration is a great example of how successful remote working arrangements are achieved through technology. We look forward to strengthening our relationship with the ARQ Group – and in collaboration – utilising the technology that changes the world for the better.”

– Enlighten Designs Founder and CEO Damon Kelly

Microsoft Australia’s chief partner officer, Rachel Bondi adds:

“Enlighten and ARQ Group are both leaders in their field with proven capabilities in their respective countries, delivering impactful tech solutions for their clients by transforming customer experiences.

“As trusted Microsoft partners, this partnership seemed like a natural fit. Not only are Enlighten and ARQ Group aligned on core competencies, but their collective performances will no doubt be elevated to new heights. We’re proud to back both organisations and I look forward to seeing the exceptional work they deliver.” 

– Microsoft Australia’s Chief Partner Officer Rachel Bondi

For 25 years ARQ Group has been the leader in digital technology and a proud history of pioneering-firsts. The first company to bring the internet to Australia and register the first domain names. ARQ created the first websites and developed the first apps. Today ARQ Group is a market leader in data, digital, AI, and cloud-based solutions.

ARQ Group is Australia’s first Premier Consulting Partner awarded the status of Amazon Web Services Managed Service Provider (AWS MSP). Also awarded AWS’s first Australian Data Competency Partner and a preferred partner for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Apple Consultant Network.

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Cloud Optimisation

10 Quick Tips for AWS Cloud Cost Optimisation

10 Quick Tips for AWS Cloud Cost Optimisation

Mark Addy

Mark Addy

10 Quick Tips for AWS Cloud Cost Optimisation

Getting to the cloud is the first step on the journey of a thousand miles to your digital transformation. But once you’re in the cloud – what’s next? 

Leveraging your ability-to-scalefinity, uplifting your agility and locking down your SecOps is critical – all paying handsome dividends to your cost savings (caveat: if done right). 

If you’re serious about slashing your cloud bills, read our 10 quick tips for AWS cloud cost optimisations and make a positive impact on your next cloud bill.

1) Choose a Cloudtelligent Partner 

Choosing a partner with a high-cloudtelligence in AWS cloud optimisations helps save you multiples beyond your optimisation fees. 

How so? Anyone can (and most cloud partners do) realise immediate savings by shutting down instances overnight and weekends, archiving old data to cheap storage and scaling-down when idle. But the serious-savings are banked by modernising your architecture and highly-automating your CI/CD deployment to deliver code to production faster and safer (amongst a plethora of other must-do advanced optimisations). Now you’re potentially slashing up to 75% off your cloud billing! The higher your partner’s cloudtelligence, the higher your cloud savings potential.

2) Turn Off The Lights When You Leave The Room

Not using resources this instant? Shut it down. It’s like turning off the lights when you leave the room. Sure, it’s convenient to keep the lights on, but it all adds up. Turn off what you’re not using and it’ll save your unused instances accumulating on your next cloud bill.

3) A Perfect Fit: Exact-Size Storage

Like your favourite comfy shoes or a well-tailored suit/dress – it fits perfectly and feels right. Incorrect sizing is uncomfortable, and this holds true in cloudonomics (visible at the end of your billing cycle). With cloud costs totally thousands-to-millions of dollars over time, it certainly pays to have your storage class tailored to fit your needs and budget. Amazon’s S3 object storage comes in five different tiers, so it’s wise to tailor according to the amount of data (and type) that you need to manage.

4) Always Be Right: Right Type Instance

It’s nice to always be right, and nothing pays higher dividends than being right when choosing your instance families to suit your application workloads. Knowing the exact memory requirements to run your services means you can minimise your cloud spend so you only pay for what you use, when you use it. That’s cloud-smarts. Choosing a cloudtelligent partner can help unlock these savings for you.

5) Trust Your Advisor (AWS Feature)

AWS offer a feature called: “Trusted Advisor”. It scans all your resources and services, checking for optimisations to unlock hidden savings. Trust your AWS advisor feature and implement the recommendations to trim the cloud-fat and reduce your cloud-spend.

6) Auto Scale App Architecture

Auto scaling your application architecture empowers you to respond instantaneously to fluctuations by adding new resources or turning off instances. This translates into optimised cloud cost controls and helps detect unhealthy instances on time.

7) Avail Spot Pricing Discounts

Did you know unused EC2 instances are available for less than the standard rack-rate On-Demand price? Set a price ceiling for your EC2 instances to control your costs and avail the price savings. Because Spot Instances enable you to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts, you can lower your Amazon EC2 costs significantly.

8) Service Usage: Monitor, Track & Analyse

Powerful tools like Amazon’s Cloudwatch monitor your log files and track changes in your resources. Doing so achieves resource optimisation and identifies potential ‘dead wood’ in your workloads (that might be costing you).

9) Use AWS Cost Management

A fantastic tool offered by AWS allows you to organise and report your cost and usage based on user-defined methods. It helps you manage billing and control your costs, improves your planning with flexible forecasting and budgeting, and optimises costs with resource and pricing recommendations.

10) Become a Reserved Instance Trader

Did you know you can negotiate a reserved instance on a 1-3 year term for a specific capacity and hourly rate? This strategy offers significant savings compared to the regular On-Demand pricing. If your demand varies, you simply reduce the duration of your reserved instance or sell it.

Some Partnership Are Worth Millions

Not all clouds are the same, and not all cloud optimisation partners are created equal. It’s the elephant in the room: the calibre of your cloud optimisation partner is directly correlated to your cloud capabilities and potential savings. Insist on the highest level of cloudtelligence money can buy when choosing your cloud optimisation partner because the difference could mean hundreds of thousands (if not millions) to your cloud-savings.

Is there money hidden in your cloud? Book your free 15 minute no obligation cloud consultation with a Cloud ARQitect and discover how much you can potentially save. There’s no selling, it’s just tech-talk with a cloud optimisation expert.

Head over to our AWS Cloud Optimisation page to learn more about ARQ’s unique Cloud Optimisation ARQitecture. 

BOOK YOUR FREE 15 MINS WITH A CLOUD ARQITECT
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Cloud Migration

Migrating to the Cloud? 7 Questions For CTOs-In-The-Know

Migrating to the Cloud? 7 Questions For CTOs-In-The-Know

Mark Addy

Mark Addy

Migrating to the Cloud? 7 Questions For CTOs-In-The-Know

“78% of users reported improvements in productivity since using cloud services”

- Gartner
  1. How Will I Use Cloud?
    Before adopting cloud, it’s important to consider how you will you use it to modernise your organisation. While running software applications are popular reasons for cloud adoption, data warehousing, disaster recovery and self-hosted email are a few of the common cloud technologies to benefit your business.
  1. What Advantages Can I Expect from Cloud Migration?
    Every organisation has different needs and will reap different benefits, however, the unanimous advantages from cloud migration are:
        1. Flexibility: with cloud technology employees can work from any location with an internet connection. If 2020 had a theme, resilience and agility would be at the top of the list given the COVID-19 climate and the proliferation of remote working. A move to the cloud means less reliance upon a visit to the office to achieve productivity.
        1. Collaboration: with cloud, sharing and collaborating achieves new level of convenience. Where previously you may have sent attachments via email, today you’re sharing documents (and editing online) through cloud services.
        1. Cost-Savings: migrating to the cloud means you’re using exactly what you need, when you need it. No more heavy CapEx outlay and provision for capital depreciation. Pay-as-you-go cloud means it’s cash-flow friendly too.
        1. Scale without Fail: traditional on-premise solutions either fail or reach danger-critical capacity before triggering the need to consider additional asset acquisition. It’s costly and takes time. With cloud solutions, you can scale without fail as extra load is allocated across the cloud instantaneously during peak periods.


  3. What to Take Up and What to Clean Up?
    Your cloud migration strategy is an opportune time because not everything needs to go up to the cloud. Assessing your current applications and environments are required pre-cloud migration. For simple applications, a classic ‘lift and shift’ approach may suffice. Complex applications may need modernisation or architecting.You may also find some things you no longer need and make no sense incurring cloud storage costs when not mission-critical. For policy or mandatory regulations, there’s cost-effective data warehousing solutions for your data records.
  4. One Big Data Migration or Incremental?
    The very nature of cloud means flexibility and scalability. This means you don’t have to migrate everything at once. While some cloud migrations are optimised by moving data and apps at once, many can benefit from moving a single workload at a time, scaling-up as you migrate each workload.
  1. Which Cloud Platform Do I Choose?
    AWS, Azure, GCP or a hybrid, multi-cloud approach? Each platform caters to different requirements and no single cloud platform or provider is all-encompassing. Your answers to the above questions will shed light on the best cloud platform. Different organisations require different solutions such as a hybrid or multi-cloud approach: private and public cloud with SaaS providers.
  1. Who’s Going to Implement My Cloud Migration?
    Choosing the right cloud migration partner is crucial to remaining on budget and on time. Your choice of cloud migration consultant will have a direct outcome to the success of your digital transformation. Cloud consultancy companies offering one exclusive platform tend to lack impartiality on your optimal cloud solution. Their cloud migration strategy is limited to a one-trick-pony lens. To serve your bespoke needs, ensure your cloud migration partner offers you the full gamut of cloud solutions and has a proven track record in doing so. Getting you to the cloud is one thing, but competitive advantage from digital transformation requires leveraging your data and digital assets. Be sure your cloud migration partner brings the trifecta of cloud, data and digital to the table. Anything less means more moving parts and the need to juggle multiple vendors.
  1. Who’s Going to Manage My Cloud Services?
    Getting to the cloud isn’t the end of your story, in fact, it’s the very beginning of your digital transformation journey. Once you’re in the cloud, the fun begins, as do the technological pay-offs for your organisation. But just like on-premise solutions, your cloud needs managing. Do you have a dedicated internal managed services team to manage your cloud services or will you use a managed service company?

Bonus Insight: Cloud Adoption in Australia 2020

42% of Australian business are now in the cloud. The majority of these business (57%) migrated within the last 3 years, reporting a 78% lift in productivity since cloud migration. Surveyed businesses cite consolidating capital infrastructure, efficient analysis capabilities and streamlined processes.

Are you ready to migrate?

We can help.

Let’s talk.

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