Post number 12 in a series of 12 from one of our provider partners, NTT.
Over the past few weeks I have tried to explore problems large organizations may be experiencing in their environment, and have suggested that using Hybrid and Public clouds may provide viable solutions to those problems. Most companies aren’t in the business of setting up and maintaining computer hardware. That is a part of their business but at the end of the day, it isn’t what makes their company money. Public cloud environments may not be for everyone. Some people may have an aversion to letting someone else control their data, while others may have concerns about data security.
In each one of the posts in this series I outlined scenarios and cloud service offerings from service providers that can help augment an enterprises’ infrastructure. Hopefully four key themes emerged for justifying the use of Public and Hybrid cloud services:
- Manage Risk
- Enhance Business Agility and Cost Minimization
- Streamline IT Operations
- Integration and Customization
Managing IT infrastructure is about managing risk. Losing control of resources may introduce risk to the enterprise. Cloud providers establish control over underlying enterprise compute, storage and networking infrastructure that helps reduce risk. However, cloud providers also provide highly protected environments that may not be feasible based on costs for your environment.
Enhancing business agility means being able to respond faster and more efficiently to business changes. Giving the enterprise the ability to expand and contract compute, storage and network capacity at-will dramatically reduces the time and costs required to develop new applications and to deploy resources where they are needed, when they are needed. This also helps minimize the time and cost to scale existing applications in response to changing demand.
Streamlining IT operations by moving resources into the cloud helps an organization focus on their core business. This helps reduce the burden of maintaining compute, storage and network infrastructure in-house.
Businesses need the ability to integrate existing enterprise IT investments when moving to customized public and private clouds.
The pace of change in the cloud computing industry rivals the intense change seen at the start of the Internet era. Cloud providers are innovating rapidly and new services and concepts are being announced daily. This means that greater benefits can be experienced by enterprises of all sizes. The ball has started rolling. Cloud computing will continue to expand. The real question is, how will your organization take advantage of it? Cloud computing may be an overused, over-hyped term, but its benefits and successful use cases are far-reaching.
Contact StrataCore to learn more about NTT America Cloud services (206) 686-3211 or stratacore.com
About the author: Ladd Wimmer
Ladd Wimmer is a valuable member of the NTT Communications team. He has over 15 years of experience implementing, architecting, and supporting enterprise servers, storage and virtualization solutions in a variety of IT computing and service provider environments. He worked as Systems Engineer/Solution Architect in the Data Center Solutions practice of Dimension Data, most recently serving as technical lead for the roll out of Cisco’s UCS and VCE vBlock platforms across the Dimension Data customer base. Ladd has also run two IBM partner lab environments and worked for an early SaaS provider that created lab environments for Sales, QA testing and Training.
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