The most significant thing in today’s ICT and the organisations that depend on it is that we are now in a time of constant change. The days of long projects, rolling five-year investments and slow transitions between generations of technology are over and even hardware refresh is on different terms. Two major trends have significantly impacted the market in the last couple of years. One is of course cloud computing, which is maturing and diversifying every day and making serious progress after perhaps a start marred by too much hype and too little choice for many organisations. Now an enterprise can have almost anything in technology as-a-service, all the way to complete ICTaaS.
The other rapid growth area, particularly in Ireland, is the rise of managed ICT services. There is nothing new in the idea of managed services but the combination of a period of economic slowdown and tight budgets prompted many organisations to buy in services rather than investing in staff and in-house resources. Do what you do best and outsource the rest, as the old industry mantra has it.
Another market force, not unrelated to the rise of cloud services, is the growing requirement for new specialist skills that are in practical terms beyond the reach of most organisations. In part that is because of a skills shortage but it also reflects the fact that a lot of the newer specialist areas—cloud architecture is a good example—are really the prerogative of service providers and consultants.
All of this reflects the way Nostra has itself developed over the last decade, through recession and into smart 21st century ICT. We have been delivering managed services for most of that time and have a proud record of a market-leading 30-minute response time SLA for service and support. But what we are most proud of is our relationships with our clients, exemplified by a retention rate of 99.5% for the last three years—and climbing.
“There is nothing new in the idea of managed services but the combination of a period of economic slowdown and tight budgets prompted many organisations to buy in services rather than investing in staff and in-house resources. Do what you do best and outsource the rest, as the old industry mantra has it”
Part of our track record is built on IT infrastructure experience, delivered in the UK and across Europe as well as here in Ireland. This has been in turn the foundation of our cloud expertise, embracing solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud. We have a dedicated Enterprise Cloud team with International clients in verticals such as Gaming and Aviation Leasing. Our accreditations include Microsoft Gold competencies in areas such as Cloud, Infrastructure, and Software & Security as well as other accreditations from leading vendors. We have, for example, worked with Microsoft on Office 365 projects since it launched as BPOS in Ireland in 2010.
With private cloud we have developed a range of tailored solutions with partners such as Brocade, Fujitsu, Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware. Hybrid cloud is now the most common because it enables legacy ICT resources and often business-critical systems to be combined with the latest and smartest cloud services. Office 365, SharePoint and Skype for Business are the most popular components but other services often include Azure Site Recovery, Cloud based DMZ solutions and Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).
Overall, today’s ICT world is exciting, constantly progressing and innovating and offering ever greater value to organisations. It is a new world of ever-smarter technology in which we are comfortable and ensure our clients are also.
Pádraigh Griffin is head of Data Infrastructure EMEA in Nostra Technologies
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