Discover our blogs

How our small team can achieve great things

45 Degrees is a club of Cloud Architects and Engineers. That’s for starters. But we’re also part of De Cronos Groep, a large group of IT companies with almost 8000 employees. Needless to say, the framework of such an organization supports our Architects and Engineers to fully focus on their core business. That’s why we zoom in on how being part of an IT cluster helps us in our day-to-day business.

Cloud Architects and Engineers: what do they do? A lot. Because our team helps enterprise customers with all aspects of their Cloud adoption journey. In that respect, 45 Degrees is your strategic partner from Strategy, People and Governance aspects, to the deep technical platform and Security work, all the way to the Service Management of IT Operations. We do this for large customers, which are often international companies with a complex IT architecture, challenging processes and large organizational structures. 

Maybe you’re wondering: how can they do that as a relatively small and agile team? The answer is easy: we are part of De Cronos Groep! 

45 Degrees was founded in August 2019. A team of experienced Architects and IT professionals came together with one mission: to do whatever it takes to help large customers with their Cloud transformation. And specifically with their Cloud transformation in a hybrid context. Because will large companies ever be “full Cloud”? It’s hard to tell, but it’s definitely not the case today. Which adds another layer of challenges to the mix: in order to help these customers, you not only need Cloud-native skills, but you also need to understand the existing on-premises world as well.

Shortly put, these hybrid environments demand a hybrid skill set from our employees. That’s why we worked out a structure, specifically for the type of commitments we do. Call it a framework. Because we believe in agile concepts, but agile doesn’t mean chaos. What we offer our employees with this approach is “freedom within the frame(work)”, which consists of about 50 capabilities. Those are not all Cloud-specific though, they are what every IT department should be doing anyway. But what is Cloud-specific about them, is the way they are implemented. For example, financial management in a Cloud environment is fundamentally different from financial management in an on-premise environment. Luckily, our team offers help to our customers in all capabilities of this framework.

Back to our Club

As said before, we’re a relatively small team, so we don’t have specialists in each domain or capability within the 45 Degrees framework. Luckily, that’s no problem whatsoever, because that’s where the power of the Cronos setup comes into the equation. Remember our island story? We explained that we make sure other people can – symbolically – build houses, apartments or shopping malls. Our Club of Architects and Engineers doesn’t have carpenters, construction workers or electricians, but we make sure we connect you to these skills to guarantee this work gets done as well. That’s exactly how you illustrate our relation to Cronos. We will find the right specialist within the Cronos network for a specific task when that is needed, but we don’t need to hire a 1000 people to cover every capability in our framework.

Let’s dig in deeper with a few examples:

Example 1 – Mobile development

One of our Architects draws your Cloud journey and it becomes clear you definitely need a mobile application for operational purposes. We don’t have the expertise, nor the strategic ambition to hire a mobile dev, a UX and UI designer or even a content strategist to make sure this app gets built. That’s why we rely on our colleagues from RMDY to map these skills on the project where it’s needed or demanded by our Club.

Example 2 – Microsoft Power Platform

A Cloud journey entails change management on a certain level. There are lots of Cloud driven tools to make your employees perform better or to make their work life a lot easier. Again, these are really specific situations that affect our efforts when designing digital transformation. However, we’re no employee experience specialists. That’s why we connect our customers with The Flow, who have profound knowledge of the Microsoft Power Platform and experience in technically supporting enterprises with Modern Work. 

Bluu is u

You get the point, right? By dipping into the expertise of other companies we allow ourselves to focus more on our own core competencies, which eventually mouths in supporting our clients to the fullest. For other skills we reach out to our colleagues from Bluu, a cluster of competence centers we’re also part of, in the first place, and the entire expertise of De Cronos Groep, secondly.

That’s what it means to be part of this huge IT framework. That is how we achieve great things.

Do you want to join our amazing team and way of working?