As businesses begin to leverage virtualization and move a variety of mission-critical and secondary applications and services to the cloud, the question becomes how do they manage, secure and optimize your virtual infrastructure to ensure you are getting the most for your dollar.
At Cloud4SMB Expo in Austin, industry experts gathered to discuss best practices for effective cloud management, including automation, application management and secure and compliant virtualization – wrapped into one package known as IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
“The silo approach of taking one application and having it over here and having your CRM over here and not integrating that is what we are seeing today. We’ve always been about bringing the entire experience to the end customer,” said Seth Bostock, executive vice president at Independence IT.
In today’s IT climate, small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) – in addition to enterprises – are faced with the classic tradeoff between best of breed or consolidation.
“We see a lot of end customers who want to make sure they have all of their IT managed in the same place,” said Sid Yenamandra, cofounder and CEO at Entreda. “You need to have a way to manage it all. You need to eliminate silos. These are businesses that can’t afford what big enterprises have. That’s where we see our market.”
While many SMBs are offloading certain applications into the cloud, they are still tasked with managing elements of IT that they would rather have managed by a trusted service provider, according to Kacee Johnson, executive vice president of Cloud9 (News - Alert) Real Time.
“A big part of what we recognize as a pain point, is they get in there and they still have to do so much of their own IT and they don’t want to have to manage their IT,” Johnson said.
When it comes to evaluating potential service providers, organizations need to take a long-term view, according to Brian Hierholzer (News - Alert) of Artisan Infrastructure, by working with a vendor that has minimized their partnerships.
“As long as the infrastructure is compliant and meets everything that you need – you want to make sure the entire stack meets your needs. A multiple agent situation will drive the price way up,” he said. “It’s a business decision at some point, which comes to a question of scale.”
The way Yenamandra sees it, cloud is all about partnerships and fostering the ecosystem.
“Our hybrid cloud approach and delivering all the additional services, we benefitted them because they could wrap it all into a single service with a single sign-on,” he said. “I don’t think you will ever see a situation where you will see a vendor delivering everything. But for the conceivable future, you will see a lot of cloud partnerships.”
However, working with too many vendors – also known as “cloud-flation” – can create turmoil, especially among the SMB segment.
“We believe in narrow focuses. For us we will choose a data center partner and that’s all they do. They don’t do cloud services. We on the other hand are an Infrastructure as a Service provider for carriers. To me it’s all about the ability to focus very specifically on what you do in the cloud and how you are going to differentiate yourself in the cloud. Let people do what they are good at,” Hierholzer said.
Largely, SMBs want their IT pain free, easy to manage, and should cost within the budgets they have set themselves, depending on the size of the business.
“What we look at it is the end customer and what do they need considering all of the different pieces. It future proofs them, so they don’t have to sign up for all services. It’s a tall order but if you don’t start that from day one, it’s not going to work,” Yenamandra added.
Security by many accounts is the one of the leading – if not the leading – hurdle for SMBs contemplating ITaaS and other “as-a-Service” cloud solutions.
“Cloud SLAs is a big topic and a panel discussion by itself. There is absolutely very little you can do as an end consumer. Control is one of many things that we see out there as a hurdle,” Yenamandra said. “There are privacy issues, manageability and costs. For a large enterprise, the economics are larger. For a business with employees under 50, the economies are a lot different.”
Looking ahead, he said generalizations do not apply to the SMB segment, since different verticals and industries have specific needs, especially among smaller businesses.
“Third-party cloud vendors today don’t care about any specific vertical – they are a horizontal play,” Yenamandra added. “We think there is a significant opportunity there – and that requires a much more sophisticated way to control their data.”
Want to learn more about cloud computing solutions geared specifically toward small to medium-sized businesses? Don’t miss the Cloud4SMB Expo, collocated with ITEXPO Austin 2012 happening now, in Austin, TX. Stay in touch with everything happening at Cloud4SMB Expo. Follow us on Twitter.
Edited by
Braden Becker
CDG and Innovation Incubator Create Generative AI Solutions for BSPs04/25/2024