Before we start planning, we get to grips with your situation.
Your needs, expectations and requirements are gathered, documented, validated and specified. This enables us to lay the foundations for the architecture, design and operation of your solution.
Every IT project begins with an assumption. At stepping stone, it begins with a question: What do you really need?
Once we’ve made initial contact, we want to get to know you – not your list of servers. We’ll meet at your premises, at our offices in Bern, or via video call. What interests us is: how do you work today? Where are the pain points? What works, what doesn’t, and why? We need an insight into your day-to-day work, not just your requirements specification.
Building on this, we’ll work with you to outline the target architecture for your IT environment. ‘Together’ isn’t just a cliché here: you know your industry, your processes and your reality. We bring the technical expertise and knowledge of best practices. But only you can judge whether a proposal is ultimately viable. That’s why we don’t build castles in the air, but solutions that stand the test of your day-to-day operations.
We also ask the uncomfortable questions. Better now than after go-live.
What guides us in this
Technology neutrality. We recommend what’s right for you, not what’s currently trending. It doesn’t always have to be Kubernetes. And not every project needs AI. Stability, availability and security take precedence over the latest hype. What counts are unit costs and long-term benefits.
Tailor-made service levels. For each system, you decide how much control you want to retain and how much you want to hand over. Which changes will you manage yourself? How granular should the monitoring be? Observability is a given with a comprehensive SLA. No extra charges, no small print.
Well-thought-out data backup. Together, we define the specifics of your backups: Recovery Point Objective, Recovery Time Objective, retention period, maintenance windows. Your data remains in Switzerland — in stepping stone’s data centres, not on foreign soil.
What we will be clarifying specifically
- Requirements gathering and software stack analysis
- Outline of the target architecture (Detailed planning to follow in Step 3)
- Assessment of technical, security-related and economic aspects
- Initial consultation on SLAs, support levels and on-call arrangements
- Backup strategy and maintenance windows
- Monitoring parameters beyond our standard specifications
- GUI and dashboard requirements for your teams
- Evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source solutions
The foundation on which everything is built
We don’t just assess whether your workloads are suited to the cloud. We assess whether the cloud is right for you — from a technical, financial and security perspective. Because ultimately, it’s not about the technology. It’s about ensuring you can take the next step with confidence.