Begin your IT Transformation with Host-Telecom.com for the competitive edge

You may be hearing a lot of news about IT Transformation with data centre solutions supported by the cloud and wondering if the investment is worth it and how complicated it might be. Should you really adopt new infrastructure, and if so how rapidly?

While some organizations, especially in the enterprise, are taking the fast track with cloud and sophisticated data centre solutions, small-to-medium size businesses also have a lot to gain from taking the technical leap sooner rather than later. As your organization grows and requires outstanding flexibility to meet fluctuating market conditions, make sure you’re prepared for the challenge with a powerful IT infrastructure.

Here we explore how fast adoption of new technology is moving and what kinds of changes some businesses are making to the data centre. We also describe Host-Telecom.com solutions that make you competitive, agile, and profitable with customized, affordable solutions for ever-evolving markets with increasing customer demands.

A prolonged sail to the cloud

While IT leaders and data centre professionals are saying that investing in IT Transformation, including cloud solutions, is critical to speeding time to market and maintaining a competitive edge, the majority of businesses haven’t necessarily been taking an "everything cloud now" approach for the fix. At least not all at once.

An Uptime Institute survey of more than 1000 IT professionals and data centre staff conducted earlier this year shows that 65% of their enterprise workloads are running in on-premise and/or self-operated data centres, a number that hasn’t changed much since 2014. However, along with this seeming lag in cloud adoption and Infrastructure as a service over the last few years, the study also reports that 55% of respondents indicate that server consolidation is a high priority, along with physical infrastructure upgrades and new data centre construction.

Winds are picking up

The survey’s overall findings also show that organizations’ data centre footprints are flat or decreasing, with 22% of workloads running in colocated or multi-tenant data centres, of which 13% are cloud-based. In addition, the cloud percentage is poised to increase rapidly, with about a third of Uptime survey respondents reporting they intend to move more workloads to the cloud to meet increased demands on the data centre.

Matt Stansberry, Uptime Institute’s senior director of content and publications, hails the changing tide, stating that, "Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualization, and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just five years ago."

Nowhere is the tide moving quite as fast as at The New York Times, which is making an aggressive move to the cloud to increase performance and enhance its position in the competitive world of online news publishing.

Jumping head-first into the cloud

In their bold plunge into IT Transformation of the data centre via the cloud, The Times is migrating almost all workloads out of their own leased data centres to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Nick Rockwell, The Times CTO, says he inherited some enormous challenges when he hopped over from the same position at Condé Nast late in 2015, not the least of which was a steep decline in print advertising revenue and the need to stay ahead of the competition with rapid online news publication and support for a growing digital subscription business. Varying audience sizes and enormous spikes in readership depending on the news cycle also require a robust infrastructure.

Upon his arrival, Rockwell describes the infrastructure at The Times as a "jumbled mess," with server cages in three leased data centres ranging in locations from Boston, to Newark and Seattle, including its own data centre in The New York Times building itself.

The plan is to move all applications that depend on Oracle databases to AWS along with some enterprise IT applications to be run on virtual machines. Most of the remainder will run on GPC with containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, while Rockwell plans on retaining the onsite data centre in The Times building for video editing, network equipment, and some legacy applications that don’t lend themselves to the cloud.

While Rockwell’s experience at Condé Nast may have prepared him to move quickly in his new position, it can be daunting to start the process when you don’t know what your choices are and what the best solutions are for your organization.

Get your transformation on

The first step in solving infrastructure problems is to recognize that you may be behind. Even as IT Transformation in the data centre is underway and many companies are getting serious about cloud, a recent study from IDG Research in conjunction with Dell EMC reports that 95 percent of responding IT leaders say that their organizations are vulnerable to competition from a small group of industry elites that are optimizing their existing infrastructures to meet business goals.

So you can see that if you’re not on the cusp of the cloud wave, you’re not alone, and with Host-Telecom.com you have the power to innovate with customized data centre solutions for an IT Transformation that meets your needs with data protection and flexibility for continued enhancements that keep your business running at a profit.

And while it’s true that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GPC are market leaders with broad solutions, you need to know if those services meet your specific needs. So let’s examine the issues of not making a decisive IT move and why tailored solutions from a dedicated staff that works with you personally can be your best bet.

The risks of doing nothing and why smaller can be better

Ignoring your IT infrastructure can have serious consequences. If your on-prem data centre goes down, you’re down. If you lose data, it’s either gone or at the very least requires a lengthy restoration process you really can’t afford. And without networking that can handle the ebb and flow of customer traffic, you risk losses in both productivity and revenue.

The data infrastructure provider can make or break you

But let’s say you’re already in the cloud with an optimized infrastructure. Does your data centre offer cloud services at reasonable prices? Do you have a personal relationship and fast communication if something goes wrong? A lot of AWS customers, including Expedia and Docker, were weighing the significance of the answers to those questions the last few days of February when they found out via Twitter, no less, about an infrastructure outage that ended up costing them hundreds of millions of dollars.

Oh, the irony!

While debugging a problem with AWS’ Simple Storage Service (S3) an engineer accidentally input a command parameter that took out a large number of dedicated services instead of the much smaller number intended. Some of those servers were supporting critical S3 subsystems, creating a perfect storm of cascading, compounding complications that took more than four hours to resolve, with backups and metadata recovery taking far more time than anticipated.

As the clock was ticking and tens of millions of their dollars were trickling down the drain, why did users have to find out the cause of the outage on Twitter? Painfully, in addition to the multitude of other problems caused by the server die-off, it took down AWS’ health status dashboard, too.

Lessons learned, and the advantages of a going with a provider that knows you

While it’s easy to pick on the the big guy, data solutions from the industry giants obviously don’t always guarantee the greatest protection. A large part of the value Host-Telecom offers is close communication and customized services from experts who know you and have designed an infrastructure architecture and solutions in tandem with you. We know you, we talk to you, and you’re in the loop at every stage of the game. By the way, we’re more competitively priced, too.

Cut your Cap Ex, concentrate on your core business

Speaking of prices, if you own the data centre space and run the guts of it yourself, that’s an enormous capital expenditure on real estate as well as maintenance, updates, data backups and protection. Even if you’re leasing servers, how do you know you’ve got best-of-breed solutions when running the data centre isn’t your core expertise?

At Host-Telecom.com our strength is the data centre and the solutions that get you where you need to be and keep you there. Plus you can reach our experts when things go wrong, day or night. We constantly optimize our services for a dynamic environment, leaving you free to concentrate on your core business without tending to the back-end data infrastructure.

The Host-Telecom.com advantage - on your site or ours

You can rent servers in our data centre or we can host servers you rent from us on yours. You can also colocate your servers in our data centres with customized configurations, full support, and hardware inventories to replace equipment as needed.

Our experts offer 24x7 best-in-class Remote Desktop support, which gives you the computing power you need and the flexibility to expand without the responsibility of server setup, support, and maintenance. Move to the cloud with ease as we design your IT Transformation when you say the word.

Remote access

With enhanced compute power at your disposal, connect to data centre servers from anywhere using almost any device, including PCs, tablets, workstations, and handhelds. Cloud Virtual Desktops, whether you work individually or as a member of a globally-distributed team with demanding access requirements, simplifies your job with the tools you need to connect from around world with the assurance of flexible cloud services based on OpenStack.

What’s included

Our rates include server installation and maintenance, and we work closely with you to create a data centre solution that works for you. As a bulk server buyer, Host-Telecom.com offers the same products at greatly reduced rates and provides the engineering expertise to install and maintain the compute environment. We pass the server savings to you, and you pay only for the computing power and restoration time if you require a data backup, allowing you to grow data volumes steadily at a predictable price.

But wait, that’s not all!

You get more than compute power, support, and data recovery speed at Host-Telecom.com. We also include hardware and software licensing for multiple servers to enable replication, compression, and other needs so that you aren’t on the line for yet greater expense when you implement our solutions.

Additional services

You can also take advantage of several subscriptions for expanded cloud backup storage, disaster recovery solutions, VMware migration, and other services to keep your business running smoothly even under very challenging circumstances. We use our own technology to anticipate your needs and continually enhance our services. And we’re always just a phone call away.

Backup to the Cloud offers enhanced data backup security and retrieval. If your business has more than 20 servers, it’s imperative to perform regular data backups to offsite storage. While your onsite data backup and recovery may be technically sound, human error can wreak havoc on even a solid solution, as we saw with AWS S3. Backup to the Cloud from Host-Telecom.com keeps your data safe even when onsite errors severely compromise its integrity.

If you’re faced with not just data loss but complete IT infrastructure failure, our Disaster Recovery Service provides immediate deployment in Host-Telecom.com’s data centres in addition to data backup. Not only can you proceed with business as usual instead of dedicating all your resources to recovery, your DevOps and QA engineers can also use this service for new application development such as CRM systems, giving you further return on your investment.

Based on the same technology we use for Disaster Recovery, Host-Telecom.com offers VMware vSphere to Cloud Migration if you’re already in a VMware infrastructure. You can move into our cloud with minimal downtime and realize immediate savings as you trade the expense of VMware support and licensing for our lower-cost infrastructure operations and support services without additional licensing fees.

Our experts answer the phone every time, and we charge less

With or without advanced service subscriptions, we really do answer the phone every time you call, and the person who answers has the expertise to help you, even at 3am on Saturday night. In addition, our services cost less than major data centre offerings from AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure. Really.

Lead the pack

As we’ve seen, though the data infrastructure environment is changing, a huge majority of businesses have yet to take advantage of data centre offerings that include cloud provisioning and services that could make them more competitive. It’s time to get out ahead of the pack and transform your business with the help of Host-Telecom.com data centre experts to create a more productive and profitable IT environment. Contact Host-Telecom.com today and get started.