Cloud: Not a One Size Fits All Solution

Sometimes evaluating the solutions offered by cloud providers seems like shopping for clothes or eating fast food. You show up to a sales presentation and you get offered a choice of small, medium or large option.

But for an enterprise-class solution, that's not the level of specificity you actually need.

Just like some people have longer arms or a thicker neck, different organizations have varied needs and requirements that go well beyond whether they want to supersize their cloud order with an extra petabyte of storage.

“Gartner is predicting that half of all enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by 2017 and providers who do not provide customized solutions will quickly begin to see their revenues decline.”

To actually add value, an enterprise-class cloud system needs to come with features and services that are custom-fit to the actual needs and requirements each company has. Offering one or two flavors isn't enough.

[Video: Not a One Size Fits All Solution]

What’s the Value-add?

The value can be seen in a number of ways. Various workloads and apps can require very different combinations of compute power, bandwidth and storage.

Every company has its own unique requirements and objectives therefore cloud solutions should be designed and built to meet enterprises’ needs. We see this especially with heavily regulated industries, such as government or financial services, where it’s especially important that solutions be customized to adhere to national and industry compliance specifications, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Safe-Harbor Frameworks or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

Mobile environments have also proven to demand additional cloud customization. As more people utilize mobile devices for their day-to-day work activities, it becomes critical that customized solutions are implemented to reduce security risks as employees their access data. Cloud providers will need to provide the very best matched available facilities, equipment, and applications so that the solution meets precisely the level of service an enterprise requires.

Don’t be limited to small, medium and large

So in order to deliver the best value for the situation, you need to have some room for adjustment. You need to be able to mix bandwidth types, storage tiers and VM horsepower to find what actually works. Otherwise you're just stuck choosing between small, medium and large.

A true enterprise solution should give companies the capability to see exactly what they're getting from their cloud solutions. That helps ensure optimal value over the life of the relationship – and not just a microwaved value meal that leaves you bloated afterwards.

Our customers are asking us to make sure we include our Managed Services with their Cloud needs to help simplify their lives. We are confident we will reduce their costs and deliver a better customer experience – This is why we have created our CloudSmartz CloudSuite Solution.

Are you seeing the same out there in your environment?

This post was originally posted on the CloudSmartz – Smarter Transformation Blog