As more and more companies prioritize digital transformation, transitioning data and applications to the cloud is top of mind for many organizations. However, establishing and maintaining cloud infrastructure comes with many challenges—from streamlining documentation to ensuring that communication is clear, even with non-technical stakeholders.
The Lucid Suite is a one-stop solution for cloud initiatives, helping organizations around the world visualize their cloud infrastructure, troubleshoot issues, maintain compliance, and more. Whether companies need a more complete picture of their cloud infrastructure or need to craft easy-to-understand diagrams for stakeholders, Lucid helps centralize documentation and accelerate cloud transformation.
Check out these six real-world examples to see the different ways that Lucid can help streamline and execute cloud initiatives.
Creating conceptual cloud infrastructure designs
As the first step to transitioning to the cloud, many organizations need to visualize new concepts for application architecture. A visual representation of how cloud infrastructure will operate is crucial for fostering alignment, enhancing understanding, and streamlining communication across teams and stakeholders, especially for complex systems that involve many moving parts.
With Lucid, it’s easy to design future cloud architecture so that you can envision a future state thanks to Lucid’s diagramming capabilities. Teams can create a conceptual design in Lucid, then use Lucid as a single source of truth to capture feedback from colleagues, compliance teams, and stakeholders. This makes it easier to ensure that a design meets compliance and security requirements before moving forward.
As a real-world example, at Ensono Digital, senior consultant Dusan Nitschneider uses Lucid as his go-to solution when he works on conceptual cloud infrastructure designs for clients. First, he uses Lucid to create a basic depiction of high- or low-level infrastructure, using different tabs within the same board to display varying levels of detail. The result is a unified view of a system—something that wouldn’t be possible with a single canvas.
Then, Nitschneider uses dynamic shapes and smart containers to display application and networking components of the cloud infrastructure. He presents the final visuals to clients and stakeholders so he can gather feedback before iterating on the diagram. Lucid makes it easy to share his diagrams with other people, whether it’s using presentation mode to walk viewers through the architecture, embedding his diagrams with other living documents, or exporting them as PNGs to embed in markdown. According to Nitschneider, Lucid has resulted in significant time savings for him and his team, increasing the velocity at which they can turn out artifacts:
“[By using a Lucid diagram], it’s very quick to just draw something out and everyone just kind of gets it right away. That makes life a lot easier than having to explain a concept.”
—Dusan Nitschneider, senior consultant, Ensono Digital
Documenting existing cloud infrastructure and validating migration
Before you can begin to make changes to your cloud infrastructure, you need to first understand the current state, visualizing what resources you have, how they’re used, and how they connect.
Capturing the full environment of your cloud infrastructure is easier with visuals rather than a static dashboard. Thanks to Lucid’s Cloud Accelerator add-on, you can automatically visualize and share existing cloud infrastructure, reviewing updates in real time so you can fully understand complex designs. By using Lucid, teams are able to make data-informed decisions and effectively plan changes to their infrastructure.
At Informatica, a software company for enterprise cloud data management, Lucid is an essential platform for thorough, up-to-date visibility into existing systems within Informatica’s network. By leveraging Lucid for cloud visualization, Informatica gains powerful insights into a complicated system, getting a high-level overview of where certain elements live, why they matter, and how they can affect other systems and processes downstream.
Using Lucid to maintain visibility into existing systems empowers Informatica employees to:
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Troubleshoot faster
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Conduct thorough security cap analysis
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Make more detailed work evaluations
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Provide more informed recommendations
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Make smarter network decisions and changes
“By visualizing current systems, my team is able to replace static drawings with what’s really out there in the world, in a meaningful way. This ultimately ensures [we] communicate the appropriate recommendations and changes as necessary.”
—Toby Foss, director of cloud network operations, Informatica
Lucid can be used to not only visualize your current state but also guide and validate migration. For example, Ensono Digital uses Lucid to guide implementation of changes to cloud infrastructure and validate that those changes have been completed. After delivering a solution to a customer, the company has to provide proof of the changes that were made. Ensono can create diagrams in Lucid and import accurate architecture, ensuring that up-to-date changes are reflected. By using Lucid instead of recreating artifacts from memory or checking over code, Ensono’s team estimates that they save several days of work.
Standardizing cloud migration
As businesses focus on digital transformation, they're migrating some—or all—of their business applications and data to the cloud, a process that often is very complicated and time-consuming. At some companies, cloud migration can take years as teams design new infrastructure, ensure security compliance, undergo audit reviews, and more. Streamlining this process and standardizing cloud migration ultimately provides greater security, flexibility, and scalability, as well as reduced costs.
To accomplish this, many companies have used Lucid to standardize their cloud migration. For example, a financial services company has used Lucid to focus on migration to AWS Cloud infrastructure. Under the leadership of the CTO and CIO, the company sought ways to streamline and standardize processes across the organization, transitioning from multiple tools to Lucid, where they can make faster, data-driven decisions across their cloud architecture strategies. By centralizing documentation, the company ensures rapid access to the latest information.
The architecture team at this organization has leveraged Lucid to streamline their infrastructure design process by adopting more efficient workflows, reducing errors, and improving the pace of decision-making. The platform team has worked with agility, significantly accelerating the overall design process. At this company, cloud migration design process teams have realized time savings of 25%-50%, and enterprise architect project teams have saved about $500,000 per year by leveraging real-time collaboration in Lucid.
