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Evaluating the Cloud:Three Steps to Infrastructure SuccessPresented by:Shawn Mills, Founder and CEO of Green House Data

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I n t h e p a s t f e w y e a r s , c l o u d c o m p u t i n g h a s g r o w n f r o m a n o f t e n - d e b a t e d n e wa v e n u e t o a n e s s e n t i a l a s p e c t o f m a n y a n I T d e p a r t m e n t . C o m p a n i e s a r e u s i n g c l o u d - b a s e d s o f t w a r e w h i l e h o s t i n g t h e i r d a t a r e m o t e l y. T h e y ’ r e i m p l e m e n t i n g d e v e l o p m e n t a n d b a c k u p p r o g r a m s i n d a t a c e n t e r s a c r o s s t h e c o u n t r y. B u t w h i l e t h e c l o u d i s h e r e t o s t a y, e v e r y b u s i n e s s m u s t e v a l u a t e f o r t h e m s e l v e s h o w b e s t t o l e v e r a g e t h e p o w e r a n d f l e x i b i l i t y o f I n f r a s t r u c t u r e a s a S e r v i c e .

Without a doubt, the combination of the cloud’s dynamic and flexible design with the lack of capital expenditures for network equipment or servers make it an attractive economic option for IT departments when compared to traditional colocation and computing models. In essence end-users get the many benefits of sizable and expensive infrastructure investments from cloud providers without the price tag. Widely publicized data losses and downtimes have understandably made many companies wary of keeping sensitive data in the cloud. So how does one answer the question, “Could it work effectively for my business?”

While the cloud and associated virtualization topics are dissected, scrutinized and debated, it makes sense to evaluate cloud computing based on three categories: purpose, performance and pricing.

PurposeT h e c l o u d c o m p u t i n g m o d e l s t a r t e d a s a w a y t o h a v e a h i g h l y e l a s t i c , p o w e r f u l – a n d y e t a f f o r d a b l e – m e a n s t o c r e a t e a t e s t e n v i r o n m e n t , h o s t n o n - c r i t i c a l a p p l i c a t i o n s , b a c k - u p d a t a , e t c .

It was, in essence, a development platform or sandbox for companies not wanting to compromise their expensive, enterprise level resources with processes and applications in the testing phases. Historically, the cloud worked perfectly in a dev environment because organizations were able to turn up servers at-will and save enormous financial resources – sometimes at the sacrifice of dependability and security because the cloud was prone to fits of unreliability and less than rock-solid security.

Then something interesting happened. Companies started wishing for, and boldly implementing, mission critical cloud environments including production applications and key data storage. And in doing so, these businesses began requiring enterprise level cloud performance – with SLAs on network availability, cloud uptime, managed services support and more. From these pioneers, the enterprise cloud has grown to be one of the most powerful IT enablement tools to help companies get the infrastructure they need at a price they can afford and a risk level they can tolerate.

“The cloud isn’t what it used to be,” said Shawn Mills, president of Green House Data, the leading green colocation, managed services and cloud provider. “We

T h e k e y t o s u c c e s s i s u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e d i f f e r e n c e s i n c l o u d o p t i o n s a n d h a v i n g a t r u s t e d r e s o u r c e t o h e l p y o u i m p l e m e n t t h e r i g h t s o l u t i o n f o r y o u r b u s i n e s s .S h a w n M i l l sP r e s i d e n t , G r e e n H o u s e D a t a

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manage private clouds in a virtualized environment and host large, enterprise cloud environments for even the most discerning companies with highly sensitive applications and mission critical data. The key is understanding the differences in cloud options and having a trusted resource to help you implement the right solution for your business.”

Today’s enterprise hosted cloud and private managed cloud services are an effective model for hosting, disaster recovery and business continuance plans, compliance requirements and more. The question is: How can the cloud best help your company? Depending on your purpose, cloud hosting may be a sound strategy for your business.

Performance

T h e h i g h l y e l a s t i c , r e a d i l y a c c e s s i b l e a n d e v e n s i m p l i s t i c n a t u r e o f t h e c l o u d i s o v e r w h e l m i n g l y p o s i t i v e f o r a n y b u s i n e s s – b u t t h e r e a r e e v e n m o r e p l u s s e s t h a t m a y n o t b e a s o b v i o u s . E n t e r p r i s e h o s t e d c l o u d p r o v i d e r s o f t e n i n v e s t i n t o p - o f -t h e - l i n e c o l o c a t i o n e n v i r o n m e n t s , e q u i p m e n t a n d n e t w o r k a r c h i t e c t u r e t h a t m o s t i n d i v i d u a l b u s i n e s s e s c o u l d n o t o r w o u l d n o t i m p l e m e n t .

In addition, the professional expertise needed to manage cloud environments, from servers to software to security to connectivity, is often times far more expensive than businesses could tolerate if they employed all the necessary personnel in-house.

Specifically, cloud infrastructures and virtualized environments enable companies to realize several advantages, through which companies can:

• Simplify IT models and improve productivity• Reduce or eliminate capital expenditures• Factor in bursts of activity, load balance and

accommodate change• Minimize downtime and avoid any associated lost

revenues• Leverage energy efficiencies and reduce waste• Gain agility in growth or change

The flexibility of cloud IT means there is a business application for almost any company, depending on their

own purposes, existing resources and employees. For example, household names such as Google or Amazon provide cloud options. If a company has in-house or trusted IT resources that can manage a large-scale cloud such as either of the two mentioned, then such a solution might be a good fit. However, if businesses need the convenience, affordability and scalability of a cloud infrastructure but lack the personnel to effectively manage it, then they should avoid the “commodity” cloud and look to a specialist in enterprise managed cloud services for a more customized cloud solution.

“If your company has a wide breadth of tech skills, a self-managed cloud may be a good fit,” Mills offered. “If you don’t have those resources in-house, a managed cloud that provides high-touch services from a trained engineering staff may better suit you.”

And what of cloud reliability and security? The truth is cloud solutions are often more reliable and secure than on-site servers and networks. Businesses that use on-site or dedicated servers to host their solutions need to keep updating and upgrading equipment in order to keep pace with demands—a large and time-consuming expense. They also need to have expert personnel ready to handle routine patches and any issues or disruptions translating to higher payroll costs. Thanks to a tough economy, personnel downsizing and realities like busy schedules or missed updates, reliability and security issues are often self-imposed in owned or dedicated IT models.

Managed cloud services resolve reliability and security issues by putting the money where it counts: in

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highly-evolved, secure environments and an enterprise level SLA. A true enterprise cloud offers high availability, provisions for sudden bursts in activity and iron-clad security.

The next consideration is carefully researching the various cloud providers. Cloud giants such as Google and Amazon offer very competitive pricing and promise reliable uptime yet both have been faced with unexpected (and often surprising) outages. An enterprise-level cloud solution can be a better option thanks to a higher level of customer support and reliability. These customers will have the benefit of robust SLA’s with guaranteed uptime, technical expertise, sound back-ups plan and an array of security features.

“Different providers offer different types of cloud environments and offer varying degrees of reliability, uptime and redundancies to help make them more bullet-proof,” said Mills. “Knowing that so many options exist, it really pays to thoroughly research different providers and find one that is well-suited to your company’s needs.”

PricingT h e c o s t e f f e c t i v e n a t u r e o f c l o u d c o m p u t i n g h a s b e n e f i t s f o r a n y c o m p a n y, a l l o w i n g I T o p t i o n s p r e v i o u s l y r e s e r v e d f o r l a r g e c o m p a n i e s w i t h b i g I T b u d g e t s a n d d e d i c a t e d s o l u t i o n s .

Cloud services can give emerging companies a chance to grow and handle unpredictable spikes in activity while at the same time give an established company a low

cost dev environment or back-up storage area. In cases where businesses have compliance or disaster recovery considerations, the cloud can help create an affordable strategy to otherwise onerous requirements.

I f y o u r c o m p a n y h a s a w i d e b r e a d t h o f t e c h s k i l l s , a s e l f - s e r v i c e c l o u d m a y b e a g o o d f i t . I f y o u d o n ’ t , a m a n -a g e d c l o u d t h a t p r o v i d e s h i g h - t o u c h s e r v i c e s m a y b e t -t e r s u i t y o u .S h a w n M i l l sP r e s i d e n t , G r e e n H o u s e D a t a

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Case Study: Global Companies Use Cloud for Elastic Growth

When a leading intermediate gold producer in the United States acquired mining operations in Turkey and Australia, they were faced with high IT costs and system inefficiencies resulting from three distinct, au-tonomously operating business units. With each lo-cation running on their own infrastructure, application updates were difficult to deploy, support costs were high, and users were frustrated. The mining organiza-tion contacted Coldwater Software, a leading product and consulting company with special expertise in net-work, infrastructure and cloud-based solutions, to an-alyze and implement solutions to address their specific needs.

To reduce costs associated with maintaining disparate networks, merge communication platforms to enable better employee collaboration, and consolidate IT in-frastructure to ease application deployments, Cold-water Software chose to deploy a globally centralized infrastructure for their client across the Green House Data gBlock Cloud®

And, because of the impact on the client’s business, Coldwater Software needed to act fast and adhere to a two-month project window. As they dove into analy-sis to present to client stakeholders, they also looked for an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider who could offer a high availability environment and connec-tion speeds fast enough to handle traffic from three continents without creating latency. Their requirements included deep experience with cloud migrations and geographical redundancy for faster deployments and better failover.

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In addition, cloud pricing can allow almost any company to build in redundancies to help avoid single points of failure.

“Because pricing is so attractive, you can build redundancies in a cloud offering that you could not afford in owned or dedicated environments,” Mills said.

In order to accurately determine the cost/benefit, a company’s fixed costs and current investment in IT must be considered. When those costs plus equipment and personnel fees are tallied, the result is typically in favor of the cloud. The expense of transitioning to a cloud model is a consideration, and reviewing options and performing an analysis is always a sound approach before making the leap to the cloud.

“We have in-depth discovery sessions with our clients to be sure that the cloud solution they want is in their best interests,” commented Mills. “And if it’s not, we help clients create an alternative managed or dedicated environment that accomplishes their business objectives.”

An increasingly popular model is a mix. A company uses the cloud for the bulk of its applications, but keeps any ultra-sensitive information on internal servers. This shift in cloud thinking, dubbed the “hybrid cloud model,” was examined in a recent article by Jon Fortt, Senior Writer for Fortune. He referred to a survey commissioned by Avanade that showed 62% of the 500+ executives polled said they intended on increasing their use of cloud-based software over the next year but still were not comfortable placing all of their proprietary data on third-party servers.

Read the Fine Print and Ask the ExpertsA s y o u w e i g h y o u r I T o p t i o n s , y o u ’ l l w a n t t o g e t a n u n b i a s e d a s s e s s m e n t . W i t h c o m p e l l i n g r e a s o n s o n b o t h s i d e s o f t h e c l o u d c o m p u t i n g v e r s u s t r a d i t i o n a l , p r e m i s e - b a s e d I T s o l u t i o n s , i t i s d i f f i c u l t t o s a y w i t h c e r t a i n t y t h a t o n e s o l u t i o n i s s u p e r i o r t o t h e o t h e r.

It truly depends on your company’s needs and the cloud provider. The tried and true adage, “You get what you pay for” is very relevant in the cloud, with lower-priced

Case Study: The Cloud as Part of a Larger IT Strategy

Systemation provides Project Management and

Business Analysis training and consulting services to Fortune 500 clientele. Located in Denver, Colorado, Systemation had a challenge common to many small and medium sized businesses. Their IT infrastructure was constantly increasing in order to carry new product deployment, client support systems and internal employee systems. Systemation was struggling with maintaining uptime to support global clientele 24/7 and wrangling in the costs related to hardware procurement and resource allocation. They could not continue to focus their internal resources on IT management and support functions. Because Systemation had a long history of providing support systems to clients, they couldn’t scrap their technological foundation and just build anew. They needed to support heritage systems and still focus on future growth. Green House Data helped Systemation design and deploy a complex hosting strategy utilizing both cloud infrastructure and standard colocation services. The Systemation complex hosting infrastructure design was rooted in three primary objectives: provide world class technology infrastructure to their clients 24/7/365, maintain segments of current systems, and have a clear IT infrastructure path for the future. Green House Data was able to integrate legacy systems with a high availability cloud infrastructure, enabling Systemation to continue to innovate and cultivate customer success. Systemation has been able to sharpen their focus on these objectives and their proprietary business models because Green House Data is managing the repeatable process and procedure related to the IT infrastructure. Uptime has been solved, CapEx has been controlled, and internal resources are free to focus on proprietary development.

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providers often failing in terms of reliability and security. Enterprise-level providers are much better equipped to provide managed solutions, SLAs and peace of mind through redundancies and back-up plans to avoid downtime and data losses.

The experts at Green House Data take these questions and considerations about the cloud very seriously and have worked diligently to create sound enterprise cloud solutions for any business. By using top-of-line hardware from DELL and EMC, reliable network configurations and smart redundancies, Green House Data is able to offer 100% available SLA. Additionally, the dedicated team at Green House Data is certified and trained to deal with any customer concerns and monitoring/resolving any unexpected issues. Green House Data is also committed to staying ahead of the curve by watching and observing the latest industry news and innovations to keep their customers in pace with the rapidly-evolving cloud options and virtualization environments.

If you would like to learn more about cloud computing and its potential benefits for your company, please give the experts at Green House Data a call. With their years of experience and commitment to providing reliable service, you may find that the cloud will be an important part of your company’s path to the sunny skies of success.

W e h a v e i n - d e p t h d i s c o v e r y s e s s i o n s w i t h o u r c l i e n t s t o b e s u r e t h a t t h e c l o u d s o l u t i o n t h e y w a n t i s i n t h e i r b e s t i n t e r e s t s .

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