Cloud services

As-a-service at your service

Longform
Image: Stockfresh

15 May 2014

The trust factor
“Enterprise customers have a justifiable expectation that their service provider must have the operational frameworks in place to support their cloud platform”
Novosco: Eddie O’Rourke
One of the key demands we are seeing in the marketplace today is the requirement for enterprise customers to ‘burst’ or ‘extend’ their existing virtual environment by leveraging a trusted local cloud provider’s infrastructure. This can sometimes be for short to medium term projects or new applications or specific initiatives such as VDI, Disaster Recovery and Backup/Restore. This trend has begun to extend into longer term hosting of critical workloads.People have been dipping their toe into the public cloud for some time now and the consensus seems to be that public cloud is fine for workloads such as test and development but not for production or mission critical applications, where there is a greater requirement around accountability, security, support and performance. Trust is a big factor.Enterprise customers have a justifiable expectation that their service provider must have the operational frameworks in place to support their cloud platform. Being able to provide ‘end to end’ accountability is also key. For example, being able to trace the cause of an issue through from the user, the connectivity and all aspects of the hosted platform gives customers the peace of mind they require before outsourcing some or all of their virtual machines. Finally, customers demand flexibility as they continue to explore the benefits of cloud services and which type of service best meets their needs. 
Demanding clarity and transparency
“A hybrid cloud solution approach gives enterprises the best of both worlds, with services such as cloud backup, cloud DR as a service, and cloud archiving adding real value but at the same time not affecting core business functions” Savenet Solutions : Lorcan Cunningham, MD
The Irish enterprise market is demanding more clarity and transparency when it comes to cloud services. They want to see real returns on investments and cost savings and they want to know exactly where their data will reside and how secure it will be.The enterprise market is reluctant to release control of core business functions but is happy to move non-core services fully to the cloud, such as file sharing and email.After that, a hybrid cloud solution approach gives enterprises the best of both worlds, with services such as cloud backup, cloud DR as a service, and cloud archiving adding real value but at the same time not affecting core business functions.We are seeing this hybrid model as the most attractive in the Irish market for the majority of customers. Customers are demanding the benefits of saving time and money; particularly time in buying, deploying and maintaining hardware and software. The business users won’t wait for IT anymore — and cloud services that meet this demand are finding themselves in growth mode.Above all, customers are seeing that cloud really does make your IT environment much more flexible. For example many of our customers are seeing that their storage, backup and DR needs can grow rapidly without them having to do anything, other than pay for more space – this allows their IT function to respond rapidly to changing business needs, with none of the headaches of traditional in-house solutions and the man hours needed just to make sure that things like backups are happening properly. 

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie