Highly regulated organizations with established traditional data center ecosystems have to jump through a lot of hoops to complete the journey to cloud. A lot of these tasks may be minor, but together they add up to a major burden for already-stretched information technology teams.

Joining forces to free teams from the tedious details are public cloud IT transformation service provider Smartronix LLC and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Managed Services division.

“We want customers to focus on their mission, national security, healthcare outcomes,” said John Sankovich (pictured, left), president of cloud at Smartronix. “We want them to take the rest off their plate.”

Sankovich and John Brigden (pictured, right), vice president of managed services at AWS, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. They discussed how the partnership between AWS and Smartronix simplifies operations and reduces overhead for highly regulated customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud transformation done faster, better, cheaper, safer

Cloud experts are highly sought after, and upskilling your employees and then requiring them to deal with routine tasks day-in and day-out is poor resource management.

“You want to make sure that your cloud talent is working on the cool stuff or they’re going to leave,” Brigden said.

By automating these tasks, AWS removes the undifferentiated aspects of the heavy lift and allows developers to focus on creating value for the company, which means the best and brightest minds feel challenged and fulfilled in their daily tasks and won’t be tempted to move on.

“Traditionally managed services means a big staff,” Sankovich stated. “You flip that model where you have developers actually deploying code and infrastructure to support it. It’s very transitional and very transformative.”

Regulation and compliance is an area that is both highly complex and high stakes. Getting it wrong is not an option, which is why many organizations want to hand responsibility to an expert, according to Sankovich.

“Highly regulated environments, both commercial, Department of Defense, national security, federal civilian agencies, state and local, they’re all looking to this and saying, ‘We really want someone that’s been through things like the AWS audited Managed Services Provider, things like their Managed Security Services Provider, things like FedRAMP or DoD IL4 and 5,” he stated.

Smartronix has invested heavily in this area, creating a FedRAMP authorized platform that sits on top of AWS and integrates with the company’s tools.

“By utilizing this joint offer, a big part of that compliance is taken care of,” Sankovich said. “Things like DevOps, things like site reliability engineering models that you hear a lot about, we fold all that into this combined service offering.”

The benefits start in the earliest stages of cloud transformation, when AWS and Smartronix step in to guide public sector customers to rapidly deploy, configure and establish a stable scalable posture on the cloud without worrying about tasks such as best practice configurations, operational runbooks, automations or the latest DevSecOps capabilities, according to Brigden.

“That’s where this partnership really excels,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit Washington, DC. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE