Cloud services

As-a-service at your service

Longform
Image: Stockfresh

15 May 2014

Fundamental change
“Going forward, 100% of clouds will be hybrid. The key to unlocking the full benefits of cloud will be in the ability of organisations to look at public cloud services as an extension of their private cloud.”
Arkphire : Howard Roberts, CIO
Cloud services offer a number of key advantages:
• Cloud transforms the economics of IT from capital intensive to pay as you go
• Provides agility for business
• Provides access to new applications & services for big and small businesses alike which levels the playing field
• Provides platform resilience – improved uptime and integrated DR (sometimes but not always!)
But with a number of key Issues to consider:
• Management
• Governance and compliance
• Data residency
• Controlling costs
• Ability to move or change providerWhat we have predominantly seen in Ireland is application specific outsourcing to cloud providers for discrete elements of the IT estate. Email is regularly the first candidate.Arkphire believes that, going forward, 100% of clouds will be hybrid. The key to unlocking the full benefits of cloud will be in the ability of organisations to look at public cloud services as an extension of their private cloud. Currently internal private clouds and external public clouds are managed as discretely separate entities. This causes a major dilemma for companies as IT cannot maintain overall control of both internal and external cloud environments from a common management platform.The emergence of hybrid cloud services will fundamentally change how external cloud services can be harnessed and the ease at which they can be deployed and managed and will address many of the key objections.

 

Aggregation and enablement
“While Ireland may be championing the smaller players, larger resellers are not missing out as enterprise clients increasingly demand a single source for expertise and technology provision”
Arrow ECS : Paul Kelly, Country Manager
According to Gartner, the global cloud computing market will be worth €207 billion by 2016 and the industry will generate nearly 14 million jobs in public and private IT cloud services within the next three to four years. More than half of these will be in small and medium sized firms.This is reflected in the demand for enterprise cloud services that we are seeing in Ireland, as organisations continue to look for ways to cut costs whilst still achieving a resilient, robust network.Ireland is meeting this demand with a greater number of smaller, niche resellers now offering cloud services. We responded by introducing ArrowSphere, the cloud services aggregation, sales and enablement platform. As a catalyst to drive cloud adoption through the channel, it allows partners to either resell or build their own services on the platform. Within this, ALVEA Cloud and Managed Services enables smaller channel players to resell, rather than them having to invest in infrastructure themselves. Both are proving popular with resellers who have recognised that while the move to cloud will not happen overnight, they need to be ready to respond to their clients as cloud computing becomes an integral part of their business, moving forward.While Ireland may be championing the smaller players, larger resellers are not missing out as enterprise clients increasingly demand a single source for expertise and technology provision. As the channel evolves and lines blur between distribution, service provision and support, collaboration and partnership will play an even greater role.

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie