The IT Nerd

Jonathan LaCour, CTO, Mission Cloud shares a few predictions for 2025 that you will find interesting.

AI Integration with Existing Services: Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will integrate AI capabilities into their existing services rather than offering them as standalone features

• Example: AI agents could help with operational tasks, automatically resolving problems instead of just sending alerts

AI-Enhanced Products Rather Than Pure AI Services: Focus will be on practical applications built into existing products

• Example: Amazon QuickSight Q was cited as a good example where generative AI is built into a product that anyone can use without needing to build AI capabilities themselves

App and AI Integration: Rather than AI completely replacing apps, there will likely be a hybrid approach where:

• Apps will declare their capabilities to other software
• AI agents will orchestrate between different apps
• The actual actions will still be handled by apps, but AI will coordinate between them

Traditional Cloud Trends:

• Continued growth in serverless computing
• Increased containerization of workloads
• Decrease in directly managed EC2 instances

The most interesting developments will be in how AI gets practically integrated into existing tools and services, rather than being offered as standalone capabilities.

To add to this, Dr. Ryan Ries, Chief AI and Data Scientist, Mission Cloud shares his predictions:

Prompt Configuration Management

Right now, everyone is trying to figure out how to store, maintain, and update their prompts.  People are often just putting them into Python notebooks and storing them in GIT repositories, but it doesn’t feel quite right. My team has been working through methodologies and trying to figure out the best way to track and update prompts.  This will be a big topic going forward, and we will see new systems coming online to help.

Autonomous Workflow Management

Autonomous workflow management refers to AI agents taking on entire business processes, from initial customer contact to final delivery, with minimal human intervention. I don’t think this is fully a 2025 thing — but we can expect to see autonomous workflow management crop up more and more in the next 5 years.

New Job Opportunities

Yes, AI agents will start to work autonomously, eventually requiring minimal human intervention.  But, this means we will need a new kind of role: AI agent managers – someone who will make sure these AI agents perform their tasks and is able to fine-tune these agents over time.

 Mission, a US-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services and ISV Accelerate Partner, today launched Mission Cloud Secure, a fully-managed Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) SaaS offering powered by the industry-leading CrowdStrike Falcon® cybersecurity platform. This new offering provides AWS customers with comprehensive managed security to stop cloud breaches.

With cloud exploitation cases growing 110% year-over-year and a widening cybersecurity skills gap, businesses need specialized, rapid-response services to combat cloud misconfigurations and breaches. Mission Cloud Secure combines Mission’s deep AWS expertise and Mission Control platform with CrowdStrike’s elite cyber expertise and best-in-class protection across endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data, delivering comprehensive protection for AWS workloads.

Key features and benefits of Mission Cloud Secure include:

• 24/7 Managed Detection & Response (MDR):  Leveraging CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete, AWS customers receive rapid threat detection and remediation across all areas of enterprise risk, supported by a 24/7 security team and backed by CrowdStrike’s breach prevention warranty.
• Proactive Threat Hunting: With continuous threat hunting powered by the AI-native Falcon platform and CrowdStrike’s expert analysts, organizations can detect and neutralize sophisticated attacks in real time, preventing compromises in cloud environments.
• Cloud-Native Security: Designed for distributed, cloud-native environments, securing both AWS services and endpoint devices seamlessly.
• Compliance Readiness: Provides tools to assist organizations in meeting major compliance frameworks such as PCI, HIPAA, and SOC 2, with audit readiness and unified reporting for streamlined compliance management.

For more information on Mission Cloud Secure, visit our Mission Cloud Secure webpage.

Mission Cloud today announced the launch of Mission AI Foundation, a comprehensive service designed to help businesses optimize their AI solutions on AWS while adhering to best practices and managing costs effectively.

83% of companies claim that AI is a top priority in their business plans. However, this widespread interest in AI adoption is often tempered by significant challenges. Concerns such as financial management, security, and knowledge gaps frequently stand in the way of companies eager to harness AI’s power to accelerate innovation and drive process efficiency.

To address these barriers, Mission AI Foundation combines support, engineering, strategy, and guidance to help organizations manage their cloud infrastructure and build for the future of AI.

The service is built on five pillars of continuous engagement:

• AI solutions optimization, architecture guidance, and prompt engineering
• Continuous cost optimization and ongoing financial management
• Guidance on foundational best practices and cloud governance
• Round-the-clock Enterprise support, led by Mission Cloud and backed by AWS
• Cloud strategy for adopting technologies that transform your business

Key features of Mission AI Foundation include:

• Access to a team of certified Cloud Analysts, Technical Account Managers, Solutions Architects, and AI Engineers
• Improving token usage to ensure AI operations are economical and high-performing
• Engineer Assist – AI, offering pay-as-you-go engineering support for AI solutions
• Continuous guidance on prompting best practices to improve accuracy, optimize template, reduce hallucinations, and enhance overall model performance
• 24/7 support with AWS Enterprise-level SLAs
• Large Language Model Operations (LLMOps) to build and maintain your dedicated operations pipeline

Mission AI Foundation leverages Mission Control, the company’s cloud services platform, along with Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Q, to provide detailed cost visualization and management tools. The service also includes carbon footprint tracking, offering insights into the environmental impact of AI workloads.

Mission AI Foundation is now available. For more information or to schedule a demo, click here or contact sales@missioncloud.com.

Mission Cloud today announced the launch of Mission Cloud Engagements – DevOps, a platform designed to transform how businesses manage and execute their AWS DevOps projects. Powered by Mission Control, Mission Cloud Engagements – DevOps provides real-time visibility, advanced reporting, and streamlined project management for DevOps initiatives.

Mission Cloud Engagements—DevOps addresses the growing need for transparency and efficiency in cloud and AI projects by offering a comprehensive suite of tools that enable both customer and Mission Cloud teams to track, manage, and optimize DevOps work in real time. The platform aligns with AWS best practices and Mission Cloud’s agile delivery methodology, Mission Cloud Engage, to ensure rapid, high-quality project delivery.

“Mission Cloud Engagements – DevOps provides customers with advanced transparency and collaboration on their DevOps projects,” said Ted Stuart, President & Chief Operating Officer at Mission Cloud. “By giving real-time visibility into each sprint and cadence, we’re not just improving project management – we’re transforming the entire experience of working with an AWS Premier Tier Partner. This platform lets businesses accelerate their DevOps initiatives, reduce risks, and achieve every milestone more efficiently than ever before.”

Key features of Mission Cloud Engagements – DevOps include:

• Project Milestone Tracking: Detailed view of progress and implementation notes for key stages in an initiative’s life cycle.
• Action Items: Flagging and tracking of issues requiring customer input or feedback, ensuring smooth collaboration.
• Risk Log: Proactively identifying and managing potential obstacles before they become roadblocks.
• Real-time Status Updates: Live updates on team status and progress, enabling quick pivots when needed.
• Transparent Reporting: Clear, accurate reporting on all work, enhancing accountability and trust.
• Backlog Generation and Prioritization: Tools to create and manage a prioritized backlog of work, aligned with best practices.

Mission Cloud Engagements – DevOps is supported by Mission Cloud’s expert teams, including Cloud Solutions Architects, DevOps Engineers, and Project Managers, ensuring that customers have access to top-tier AWS expertise throughout their projects.

Mission Cloud Engagements – DevOps marks the first release in Mission Cloud’s innovative Engagements portfolio. This platform sets the stage for a comprehensive suite of specialized solutions, with additional Engagement types slated for future rollout.

Mission Cloud Engagements—DevOps is exclusively available for purchase in the AWS Marketplace. For more information or to schedule a demo, visit https://www.missioncloud.com/mission-control/engagements/devops or contact sales@missioncloud.com.

Mission Cloud has announced the launch of Mission Cloud Gateway, an innovative software platform designed to help businesses optimize their AWS environments and drive efficient growth while adhering to foundational best practices. Mission Cloud Gateway is exclusively available in the AWS Marketplace.

Mission Cloud Gateway combines AWS expertise, consultative guidance, and advanced tooling to address the evolving needs of businesses in the cloud. The platform focuses on managing costs, improving governance, and adopting technologies that transform businesses, all aligned with Mission Cloud’s strategic AWS spending methodology, re: Invest.

Key features of Mission Cloud Gateway include:

• Mission Cloud Score: A comprehensive assessment tool that measures alignment to AWS best practices across cost, operations, security, reliability, and performance.
• Tailored Recommendations: Identifies opportunities to improve AWS environments based on specific business goals.
• Resource Monitoring: Provides a single view to monitor critical AWS resources, evaluate resource-specific recommendations, and track alerts.
• Engineer Assist: Pay-as-you-go DevOps support for ad-hoc tasks and engagements, allowing businesses to delegate modifications and troubleshooting to Mission Cloud’s team of experts.
• Managed Reserved Instance Operations: Our experts manage your Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) purchasing, de-risking commitments, and freeing capital for growth initiatives.
• Expert Guidance and Implementation: Provides coordinated support from Cloud Analysts, Solutions Architects, and DevOps Engineers to ensure each initiative makes the desired impact while preserving performance and improving development lifecycles.

Mission Cloud Gateway is ideal for enterprise customers looking to optimize complex AWS environments. It takes the guesswork out of billing, usage, and forecasting, tracks infrastructural health, and helps businesses adopt best practices and native services that maximize their investment in AWS.

For more information about Mission Cloud Gateway or to schedule a demo, visit https://www.missioncloud.com/mission-control/gateway or contact sales@missioncloud.com.

Mission Cloud Services, Inc., a US-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner, today announced a generative artificial intelligence (AI) expansion to its Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with AWS. The new strategic initiative strengthens Mission Cloud’s commitment to AWS, providing further support to businesses exploring and implementing generative AI solutions.

According to PwC, 73% of U.S. companies use AI in some aspect of their business today. With the AI market growing by almost [30% year-over-year, businesses are looking to adopt AI to drive productivity and efficiency, realize ROI, and gain a competitive edge. With 50+ proof of concepts (POCs) moving into production, Mission Cloud enables customers to explore and validate AI-driven initiatives with their AWS expertise. The SCA expansion enables Mission Cloud to accelerate delivery of its generative AI solutions and services to US companies through joint go-to-market activities and POC funding.

Mission Cloud has a proven track record in generative AI, with numerous solutions already in production, serving customers across major industry segments including financial services, healthcare, life sciences, media and entertainment. Earlier this year, Mission Cloud achieved the AWS Generative AI Competency, which recognizes Mission Cloud as an AWS Partner that helps customers and the AWS Partner Network (APN) drive the advancement of services, tools, and infrastructure pivotal for implementing generative AI technologies.

As one of the first managed Amazon Q providers, Mission Cloud continues to collaborate with AWS to deliver secure and innovative AI solutions to customers worldwide. Companies need to experiment with and adopt these new capabilities and applications at the speed of AI to drive operating efficiencies and transform user experiences for their customers.

By working with AWS, Mission Cloud ensures PoCs move to production and make long-term business impact through continuous engagement, proven solutions, reference architectures, and purpose-built services spanning the develop, deploy, measure, and optimize lifecycle. Mission Cloud provides customers with a vast array of generative AI solutions, such as Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), including summarization, fraud detection, and data augmentation; virtual assistants and chatbots powered by Amazon Bedrock or Amazon Q; call center analytics; audio and video dubbing and captioning; content generation, including text and images; and day two operations supporting continuous improvement, including training infrastructure, integration, machine learning operations (MLOps), and large language model operations (LLMOps).

This generative AI expansion builds on Mission Cloud’s existing initiatives and strengthens its strategic partnerships with leading independent software vendors (ISVs) like CrowdStrike, ensuring secure, scalable AI solutions powered by AWS.

For further information about Mission Cloud and its generative AI capabilities, visit https://www.missioncloud.com/solutions/data-analytics-machine-learning/generative-ai.

Mission Cloud, a US-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner, announced today that it has achieved the AWS Generative AI Competency in the category of Consulting Services. This specialization recognizes Mission Cloud as an AWS Partner that helps customers and the AWS Partner Network (APN) drive the advancement of services, tools, and infrastructure pivotal for implementing generative AI technologies.

Achieving the AWS Generative AI Competency in the category of Consulting Services differentiates Mission Cloud as an AWS Partner that has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success empowering businesses to build a successful future in the cloud with AI technologies and by delivering a full suite of solutions that leverage AWS. Mission Cloud possesses the experience and expertise demonstrated through successful projects addressing customer challenges using generative AI solutions. These solutions enable digital transformation strategies for augmenting customer experience, delivering hyper-personalized and engaging content, streamlining workflows, and delivering actionable results powered by generative AI technology from AWS.

The AWS Competency Program aims to assist customers in connecting with AWS Partners who possess extensive knowledge and technical expertise in using AWS technologies and best practices to adopt generative AI. These AWS Partners facilitate the seamless integration and deployment of AWS-based solutions to meet the unique needs of all customers, from startups to global enterprises.

Mission Cloud provides AI services and software for businesses on AWS by using generative AI to scale existing models and build new, secure applications. Mission Cloud’s team of experts considers the unique needs of companies, offering customized solutions and strategic guidance for professional services projects.

Mission Cloud is a leading born-in-the-cloud managed services, consulting provider, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner at the forefront of generative AI technology. We help innovative companies use gen AI to scale existing models or build new, groundbreaking applications. Mission Cloud empowers businesses to build a successful future in the cloud with the broadest capabilities, software, and services. Our team of AWS experts empowers businesses to migrate, manage, modernize, and optimize their cloud environments, ensuring a successful future in the cloud. 

Mission Cloud, a US-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Partner, announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Mission Cloud to its Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Elite 150 category for 2024.

The MSP 500 list compiled by CRN serves as a comprehensive guide to identifying and recognizing the top Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in North America. MSPs play a crucial role in supporting businesses by offering managed services that enhance efficiency, simplify IT solutions, and optimize return on investment.

The annual MSP 500 list is divided into three sections: the MSP Pioneer 250, recognizing companies with business models weighted toward managed services and largely focused on the SMB market; the MSP Elite 150, recognizing large, data center-focused MSPs with a strong mix of on- and off-premises services; and the Managed Security 100, recognizing MSPs focused primarily on off-premises and cloud-based security services.

The MSP 500 list aims to showcase and celebrate MSPs that are driving growth and innovation in the industry. These service providers not only enable businesses to harness complex technologies but also contribute to maintaining a strong focus on core business goals without stretching financial resources. By categorizing MSPs based on their business models and areas of expertise, the list helps end-users find the right partners to meet their specific needs and challenges in the rapidly evolving technology landscape.

Mission Cloud is dedicated to accelerating the cloud and AI evolution for startups, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), and enterprises on AWS. Renowned for its extensive AWS certifications and capabilities, the company excels in empowering customers to leverage cutting-edge technologies such as generative AI. Offering a suite of top-tier professional and managed services, including AWS cloud operations, migrations, modernizations, AI, and analytics, Mission Cloud’s offerings are meticulously crafted to meet the distinct needs of AWS customers.

The MSP 500 list will be featured in the February 2024 issue of CRN and online at http://www.crn.com/msp500.