LAUNCH IT. An Overview of Cloud Computing

The Situation | The Challenges | The Solution | The Benefits

The Situation

You're stuck between a rock and a hard place

Your organization is looking to IT for innovative solutions that drive competitive advantage. But it also is asking you to do it with less money. You need a flexible solution. Something scalable, cost-efficient, and easy to deploy.

The cloud can provide your organization with the flexibility you need. It provides you an agile and scalable IT environment with low upfront costs and minimal infrastructure investment. Plus, it gives your organization the ability to sample providers before committing resources.

The Challenges

Unfamiliarity with and misconceptions about the cloud are major obstacles to adoption. Many organizations simply don't have enough education and experience with the benefits of the cloud to understand how it helps make your IT environment more flexible. In addition, there may be a sense that your IT department doesn't have the resources to implement such sweeping innovation.

The most common challenges fall into one of these categories:

Resource Issues

Increasing budget cuts to IT departments are decreasing the time and personnel you can dedicate to cloud initiatives. This creates concerns that you might not have the resources to maximize a cloud investment.

Knowledge Issues

With so few organizations having experience with cloud solutions, it's understandable why they are hesitant to adopt. There's fear that IT departments lack the training to administer a cloud solution, plus there's confusion as to where to turn for impartial information about which solution would be best.

Busting Cloud Myths

The Cloud Compromises Security.

False. Cloud providers are required to utilize advanced, enterprise-level servers employing best-in-class technologies to ensure high levels of uptime. They must also incorporate security infrastructure (ISO/ISE 27001 and SA S 70) with regular updates—meaning, you often have better security with the cloud.

49% of enterprise data centers experienced targeted malware/botnet activity as opposed to 5% of cloud-hosting providers. ²

Cloud Deployment is Complicated.

False. Cloud computing can sometimes be deployed for your organization in minutes. Providers have existing applications and infrastructure in place on their servers eliminating the need for in-house software and/or hardware installation.

Cloud Computing Takes Away Control.

False. While application and process customization may be different in the cloud, there are some ways it is superior. Vendors measure user activity to look for ways to improve applications and processes. The results are frequent upgrades to functionality at no incremental cost to you.

The Solution

Your organization needs flexibility to meet today's challenges. Public cloud computing offers several options that provide you with adaptability, scalability, and cost-efficiency:

Software as a Service (SaaS)

With a SaaS solution, your service provider hosts applications. Your users will access these apps through a browser or mobile app, so you don't have to spend time and money installing apps on devices. Beyond deployment advantages, SaaS provides user scalability allowing you to rapidly increase or decrease deployment based on your needs.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS reduces your total infrastructure costs by providing you with a pool of virtual machines hosted offsite. This allows you to scale servers, storage, networking, load balancing, etc. to your needs and helps reduce your capital IT investment expenditures.

Platform as a Service (Paas)

PaaS serves as a hybrid option between SaaS and IaaS. You get the IT infrastructure needed for hosting applications and the development tools and environment to build and deploy cloud applications. Typically, a PaaS consists of an OS, a programming language environment, a database, and a web server. These setups are ideal for organizations that want to forgo the costs of buying and managing any of the underlying hardware and/or software.

Questions to Ask Before Signing a Cloud Service Contract

Before your organization makes the transition, be sure to ask the following questions:

How quickly will cloud services be up and running?
How quickly can service levels be adjusted as usage demands rise and fall?
Does the contract apply to the infrastructure as a whole, or does it cover each individual machine?
How often will downtime occur for scheduled maintenance, and how will disruptions be scheduled?
Will the provider accept an exit clause allowing termination of the contract without penalty in the case of recurring incidents?
What types of service problems result in refunds? What types receive service credits? What are the redemption procedures in each case?
Will the organization receive monthly reports that analyze performance against agreed-upon metrics?
How will the cloud be monitored for regulatory compliance?

The Benefits

The flexibility of cloud computing into your IT environment comes with several benefits.

25% Expected savings from IT budget with cloud computing over 4 years ³

Maximize Resources with Minimal Investment

Predictable budgets—Change IT budget from expensive upfront costs to lower monthly charges.
Reduced infrastructure costs—Eliminate the need for a large amount of in-house infrastructure thus lowering the drain on budget and IT support.
Lower operational costs—Maintenance, personnel, updates, and infrastructure upgrades are handled by your vendor freeing up budgets for other IT initiatives.
Freedom from commitment—Most vendors operate on a pay-as-you-go model. So you can quickly and easily switch to alternate vendors if you find a better fit.

Drive Competitive Advantage

Faster speed to market—Become more agile and responsive to customer needs with improved workflow and the ability to rapidly prototype.
Drives innovation—Cloud computing drives innovation in two ways: (1) Customer value proposition. Enhance current products and/or services to improve the overall customer experience. (2) Value chain. Gain flexibility in operating capabilities so you can change your role within the market rapidly or create a new value chain for consumers.
Reduces barriers to entry—Lower overall infrastructure costs and reduce the need for large onsite data centers.
Closer connection to resources—Maximize the ability to operate remotely by making data and applications accessible from any device and any location.

Maximize Flexibility

Deployment flexibility—Deploy at your speed and comfort level.
Scale flexibility—Rapidly and fluidly scale up or down to meet your organization's needs. Pay only for what you use.
Future flexibility—Adapt to new technology as it is introduced.

Our Partners

Our cloud solutions include a variety of top vendors that can provide you with the leading services across all levels of cloud computing.

Microsoft® Office 365® brings together cloud versions of the most trusted Microsoft Office Web Apps with a set of easy-to-use, web-enabled tools that work with existing hardware and are backed by robust security, reliability, and control.

Symantec™ Email Security.cloud combines advanced email antivirus, antispam, and content filtering capabilities in an easy-to-manage solution that requires no onsite hardware or software. Part of an integrated approach to securing and managing email, web, and instant messaging traffic, Email Security.cloud includes an SLA that offers 100% protection against known and unknown viruses and a 99% spam capture rate. (95% for email with double-byte characters.)

Offsite storage of backups is critical to surviving a catastrophic loss of data. Veeam Backup & Replication™ Cloud Edition turns every leading public storage cloud into an easy-to-use data repository for your backups. With support for 15 leading public storage clouds, Veeam Backup & Replication lets you use the best cloud provider for your needs and makes adding offsite backup to the cloud easy without the need to understand how cloud storage APIs work or redesign your local backup processes.

We've Got the Proof

Software Partnerships and Certifications

Microsoft Large Account Reseller Partner of the Year — 2011
Microsoft Volume Licensing Partner of the Year — 2012
Microsoft Server Platform of the Year 2012
Microsoft 2009 Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management Partner of the Year
Microsoft Corporate Accounts Global LAR Partner of the Year Finalist 2012
Microsoft Identity and Security Partner of the Year Finalist 2012
Microsoft Management and Virtualization Partner of the Year Finalist 2012
Microsoft Windows Intune Partner of the Year Finalist 2012
Microsoft Worldwide Online Services Commercial Finalist 2011
Symantec National Platinum Partner
Symantec SMB/Commercial Partner of the Year — 2012
Symantec Public Sector Partner of the Year — 2012
Top-selling LAR Partner
Symantec Data Loss Prevention Specialization
Symantec Large Account Reseller of the Year 2008
Symantec Master Specialist — Data Loss Prevention
Symantec Archiving and eDiscovery Specialization
Symantec Data Protection with Backup Exec Specialization
Symantec Data Protection with NetBackup Specialization
Symantec Encryption Specialization

See For Yourself

Success Story: The Thrill of a Humdrum Transition

The Problem: Legacy architecture was limiting access to email.

The organization had a problem. Their old email architecture didn't allow for mobile access and was inundating users’ machines with stored files. This created a risk of catastrophic data loss if hard drives had crashed and slowed the flow of information.

The Approach: Assessed organization's needs and provided a recommendation that would create a seamless transition.

We immediately began a discovery process to determine the organization's messaging environment. We assessed what hardware and software was being used not only for messaging but also spam filtering and security. Using that information, we devised a strategy to migrate their system to the cloud version of their legacy architecture limiting the amount of retraining needed.

The Results: An uneventful transition and implementation of a cloud solution.

As a result of our approach, the organization was able to migrate 500-plus users from a desktop email environment to a cloud approach. Hardware and infrastructure overhead for emails was all but eliminated, and users could access their messages almost anywhere with ease.

See How It Works