AWS / Azure / Google Cloud Consulting

General cloud strategy answers what to do. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud consulting answers how to do it on a given provider: which services to use, how to organize accounts, how to secure them and how to keep them efficient. Work usually falls into five groups:

• Provider selection: a structured comparison against your requirements.
• Architecture design and review: new designs and audits of existing ones.
• Account structure and governance: organization hierarchy, access, policies and budgets.
• Optimization: performance, reliability, security and cost improvement.
• Enablement: training and runbooks for your team.

For the earlier question of whether and how to use the cloud at all, start with cloud consulting services.

Avoid the question "which is best?" It has no general answer. Compare against your own criteria and test with a small proof of concept. Criteria that usually decide the outcome:

Each provider publishes a design framework you can use to judge how well a proposal fits: the AWS Well-Architected Framework (opens in a new tab), the Azure Well-Architected Framework (opens in a new tab) and the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework (opens in a new tab). Reading all three shows how similar their principles are.

A well-architected review compares a workload with a provider's published design principles and produces a prioritized list of fixes. The frameworks organize the questions into pillars. They cover operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimization, and the AWS framework adds sustainability as a pillar of its own.

A useful review is a conversation about trade-offs, not a scorecard. Expect it to cover:

• How changes are deployed and rolled back.
• Identity design and how permissions are granted and reviewed.
• Failure scenarios and what happens in each: an instance, a zone, a region, a dependency.
• Backup, restore and recovery objectives, with proof the restores work.
• Whether capacity is sized to measured need.
• Whether spend is allocated to owners.

Run reviews for important workloads on a schedule, such as before a major launch and each year afterward, and track the findings like any other backlog. The AWS Prescriptive Guidance (opens in a new tab) library and the Azure Architecture Center (opens in a new tab) hold patterns for common fixes.

Many businesses arrive with an account created by one engineer years ago. Consulting then becomes a cleanup and structure exercise.

1. Inventory and ownership: list accounts, subscriptions or projects, and assign an owner to each.
2. Organization structure: separate production, development and shared services; use the provider's hierarchy features for policy inheritance.
3. Identity cleanup: remove long-lived keys, enforce multi-factor authentication and replace broad administrator access with narrow roles.
4. Baseline guardrails: policies that block risky settings, such as public storage, by default.
5. Logging and alerting: central audit trails and alerts on high-risk actions.
6. Infrastructure as code: capture existing resources in code; see infrastructure as code services.
7. Budgets and tagging: alerts, owners and review meetings.

Monitoring and alerting practices are covered in cloud infrastructure monitoring services.

Providers secure the underlying facilities and services. You secure your configuration, identities and data. The AWS Shared Responsibility Model (opens in a new tab) explains the principle, and Azure and Google Cloud publish equivalent guidance.

• Treat identity as the main perimeter: strong authentication, least privilege and short-lived credentials.
• Encrypt data at rest and in transit, and control who owns encryption keys.
• Turn on audit logging everywhere and protect those logs.
• Scan for misconfiguration continuously, not once a year.
• Use the provider's compliance reports as evidence of their controls, while remembering that your own configuration must also meet the standard.

The Cloud Security Alliance guidance (opens in a new tab) gives a neutral checklist across platforms, and cloud security services go deeper.

All three providers publish information about the energy sources and efficiency of their regions and offer tools to estimate the emissions associated with your usage. Use them as inputs, alongside latency, residency and price, when selecting regions.

The bigger lever is usually your own use: right-size instances, delete unattached storage, schedule non-production shutdowns, prefer efficient processor options where compatible and archive cold data. The Green Software Foundation (opens in a new tab) offers practical guidance for measuring and reducing software emissions.

• Software company: a team choosing the platform where its customers' enterprise identity and procurement already live, then structuring accounts per environment.
• Retailer: a review of a storefront before peak season, finding a database with no tested restore and an autoscaling rule set too low.
• Healthcare provider: an account baseline that blocks public storage and requires encryption, applied automatically to every new project.
• Media company: a platform comparison driven by the strength of a specific analytics and video-processing service for its workload.

These are illustrative, not Kramate client results.

In AWS, Azure and Google Cloud consulting, region selection is both a technical and a legal decision. Confirm requirements with legal counsel.

• USA: HIPAA for health data, financial and state privacy laws, and federal authorization programs for government work.
• UK: UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018; regulated firms have outsourcing and resilience duties.
• Australia: Privacy Act 1988 and Australian Privacy Principles; sector rules for finance and critical infrastructure.
• Singapore: Personal Data Protection Act and financial-sector technology risk guidance.

Check that each service you plan to use is available in your chosen region, since newer services arrive in some regions before others. Confirm support hours and incident contacts in each region you operate.

For AWS, Azure and Google Cloud consulting, fees and cloud usage charges are separate lines. For consulting, price depends on the number of accounts and workloads, review depth, whether you want hands-on remediation and how much training is needed.

For the platform bills, the main drivers are:

• Compute type, size and hours.
• Storage volume, class and retention.
• Network traffic, especially data leaving a provider or crossing regions.
• Managed database and analytics services.
• Support plan level.
• Commitment discounts versus flexibility.
• Third-party licenses and marketplace products.

A fixed-price review suits a bounded assessment, a dedicated team suits ongoing platform engineering and hourly suits expert questions. Pair the work with cloud cost optimization once the estate is organized.

1. Hands-on depth on the platform you use, shown through specific architecture discussion.
2. Neutral comparison skills and disclosed partner relationships.
3. Use of the provider frameworks for reviews, with written findings.
4. Remediation ability, not only report writing.
5. Governance and cost practices built into every environment.
6. Team enablement: training and handover.
7. Clear ownership of code, templates and documentation.

Be careful with claims of platform credentials in any proposal, including ours: ask to see them and what they cover.

Every engagement is led by a dedicated project manager, with daily Slack or Teams updates and a progress review at the end of each two-week round. An NDA is signed before detailed discussions, and every artifact we produce, from diagrams to templates, is yours. See our approach for the stages.

Kramate can run the work or join your engineers, using least-privilege access and peer-reviewed changes. A free consultation is followed by a detailed estimate within 24 hours, with fixed-price, dedicated-team or hourly options.

• AWS Well-Architected Framework (opens in a new tab)Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework (opens in a new tab)Microsoft
• Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework (opens in a new tab)Google Cloud
• AWS Prescriptive Guidance (opens in a new tab)Amazon Web Services
• Azure Architecture Center (opens in a new tab)Microsoft
• AWS Shared Responsibility Model (opens in a new tab)Amazon Web Services
• CSA Security Guidance for Cloud Computing (opens in a new tab)Cloud Security Alliance
• Green Software Foundation (opens in a new tab)Green Software Foundation