Our Director of Cloud Mike Walls sits down with our senior cloud engineer and AWS Practice Lead Dinesh Sharma to talk about how to maximise ROI and resilience in the cloud.
Cloud success always begins with knowing the WHAT, understanding the WHY, and only then designing the HOW.
We use this approach to guide every engagement. We strengthen the foundation first; account structure, governance, security and network design, and then reduce waste through right-sizing, cleanup and smarter use of AWS services. Once the environment is stable and efficient, we help teams adopt scalable patterns like serverless, containers, automation and modern CI/CD.
This method consistently helps customers gain agility, simplify complexity and achieve strong ROI from their cloud investments.
Strong foundations build bigger, better buildings and the cloud is no different.
The real value comes from fixing the foundations first, not just turning knobs. In the Mitre 10 project, we followed a structured and practical approach that any organisation can apply.
We started by understanding what was driving their costs and why certain patterns had grown over time. Then we rebuilt a strong foundation:
This transformed the environment into a cleaner, compliant and future-ready cloud platform.
I believe technical excellence isn’t about knowing every AWS service it’s about using the right skills at the right time to solve the right problem.
Winning the award was an honour, but for me it reflects something bigger; the impact deep technical capability can have when applied carefully and thoughtfully for customers.
Our experts focus on understanding a customer’s environment, their challenges and the outcomes they care about. From there, technical excellence becomes a tool, not to over-engineer but to simplify, modernise and optimise. It helps us spot waste others miss, design scalable architectures, strengthen security and create cost effective, sustainable solutions.
I’ve always believed that knowledge is one of the few things that grows the more you give it away.
Mentorship and community engagement play a huge role in closing the skills gap.
I mentor budding engineers, interns and anyone curious about cloud. Sharing real-world experience, reviewing their work, guiding their thinking and helping them understand the “why” behind decisions, builds confidence faster than any textbook. The same applies to community involvement; speaking at meetups, running workshops and encouraging my team to participate creates a space where learning becomes normal and accessible.
When people feel supported, they grow quicker as does the whole industry.
AI is changing the way we build and operate systems, but it isn’t replacing expertise; it’s amplifying it.
AI-driven development and “vibe coding” or telling AI what you want in natural language will speed up how teams prototype, explore ideas and troubleshoot. But AI can hallucinate, generate wrong patterns or create architectures that look OK but can’t scale up. That’s where expert oversight becomes essential. The value lies in combining AI acceleration with strong technical judgment to ensure the work is correct, secure and resilient.
From a cloud operations perspective, Infrastructure as Code (IAC) will be around for at least for the next 2–3 years. Vibe coding is great for initial drafts and quick proof-of-concepts, but enterprise-grade systems still require well-designed architectures supported by clean, reliable IaC.
We built a global landing zone to meet strict healthcare regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the US. Data security, governance, and resilience were non-negotiable. The architecture featured strong isolation, encryption, centralised governance, cross-region resilience and strict access controls. The key lesson: resilience and compliance are most effective when built into the foundation, not added later.
Start with structure, design with purpose and savings will follow.
The biggest improvement comes from getting the basics right. If the foundations are solid, half the job is already done. A well-designed environment naturally prevents waste, reduces billing surprises and makes optimisation far easier.
The second principle is to always match the solution to the size and impact of the problem. In cloud, a single problem can have ten different solutions. The best choice is not always the most advanced, the most complex, or the one using the latest AI-driven features. It’s the one that is fit for purpose, operationally simple and cost-aware.
A resilient cloud strategy isn’t something you set once and forget it’s something you refine, update, and strengthen over time as the business grows and technology evolves. Every modern organisation’s cloud strategy should have:
Together, these give organisations confidence to operate and scale even in challenging conditions.
Modern scalable platforms and digital experiences are now key to success, with unpredictable events ranging from global geopolitical uncertainty to cyber threats are driving the need for greater resilience. This has shown us that modern cloud environments are more important than ever.
