Articles
Is your service provider on the right cloud?
Sometimes there are simply too many options and everything begins to sound the same so how do you select the best solution for your company? OK. Let's back up a second. You made the decision to outsource some or all of your IT operations. Either you need more capacity or perhaps you want to rent extra capacity for peak loads. Basically, you need to find new ways to quickly and easily accommodate to changes in your business without causing disruption.
Many of your peers are turning to cloud computing. Buying IT as a service can help alleviate the challenges of rapid growth and enable faster business innovations. Cloud computing also moves IT from a large capital expense to a predictable operating expense. And, since you no longer have direct control of the infrastructure, you need to trust that someone else does. Vendor choice is critical.
At some point, though, most service provider offerings begin to sound alike because those providers offer similar assurances. You want your service provider to handle the tough technology choices, but you also need to feel confident that there will be no surprises down the road. How do you break through the noise? In other words, how do you make sure you choose the right service provider?
It is important to know that your service provider has made fundamentally sound choices in the IT behind its infrastructure. How will your data be protected? What is the service-level agreement like? Is elastic scaling possible (without disruption, migration, or process change)?
Service providers understand that their ability to cost-effectively offer IT as a service requires a fundamentally dynamic and flexible architecture. That architecture can drive down costs over time and scale up or down to meet business demands.
From a data storage perspective, many service providers have already chosen NetApp as their preferred vendor. NetApp provides a single, unified platform that has been optimised for shared, secure, virtual environments and can be provisioned on an as-needed basis. It allows IT to scale elastically to meet peak and off-peak business needs most cost effectively.
Speak with service providers to discuss your concerns and expectations about moving all or part of your IT to a services-based model.
By Laurence James, UK Product Alliances and Solutions Marketing Manager, NetApp
- Posted on: 30th January 2012 at 12:00am
