April 2014 - CtrlS Blog

With total IT infrastructure outsourcing on the rise, many companies look at it as a cost saving factor. Cost saving is one of the many benefits that total IT infrastructure outsourcing has to offer. However, having just this one factor in mind isn’t enough; there are other factors and benefits that come along with total IT infrastructure outsourcing to be considered. This will help you make a sound decision in this crucial aspect of your business outsourcing.

IT infrastructure outsourcing has emerged as one of the most sought after service for small and medium enterprise. The reason is obvious; tough competition in the market with competitors who come with big and established brands to their credit. Given the scenario, survival in itself seems a herculean task. Technology and IT have a major role to play in a business setup where the primary goal is national and international brand management. Big companies have both, the manpower and the money power to have the best in IT infrastructure and technology working for them. On the other hand, small and medium businesses which are still struggling to find their foothold in the market may not be in a position to invest in the sort of IT infrastructure that can give them a level playing field with industry biggies.

IT infrastructure outsourcing can be a blessing for such companies who want to have the best and the latest technology working for them without having to drain their finances. Though many big brands have also started considering IT infrastructure outsourcing as a very viable option to save cost, they look at outsourcing for just a few aspect of their IT needs. On the other hand, a small and medium enterprise may look at it as the affordable option. Though cost saving is a major factor in total, it is just one part of the whole story.

Let us consider four major benefits that come from total IT infrastructure outsourcing.

Competitive Edge
For a company to gain and maintain a competitive edge, it needs a more responsive IT infrastructure. IT infrastructure that can respond to changing business needs, technological advancement and need for competent workers is essential. Outsourcing your IT infrastructure needs, gives you the needed expertise to handle all these aspects proactively and with ease, saving you a lot of time and hassle.

Flexibility and Agility
The rapid advancement in technology and a corresponding change in market scenario, demands a more flexible and agile IT infrastructure. This is especially essential to accommodate the introduction of new products and services faster and with greater efficiency. Outsourcing your IT infrastructure can help you setup an IT infrastructure module that will guarantee operational excellence. This will in turn, will help you focus on exploring new markets and reaching new customers.

Money Management
With the global financial crisis hovering, there is a much greater need for businesses to protect and maintain the operation expenditure of the business. Total IT infrastructure outsourcing will help release some of your capital expenditure, thus enabling you to divert those funds into your operation expenditure and giving you more financial flexibility and better fund management options.

Manpower Management
Manpower management is crucial from any business point of view. You would want to hire and maintain employees who are highly productive definitely. But you also need to concentrate on your core business module if you are to increase your competitive edge. Outsourcing your IT infrastructure will free you from the hassle of maintaining an in-house IT team. This will help you have more people concentrating on strategically important aspects of your business like sales, marketing, business development, and so forth.
It is very crucial that you consider these benefits when looking for a total IT infrastructure outsourcing provider. Keep all these factors in mind and choose a IAAS service provider whose goals for your business encompass all of them.

Organisations adopt private clouds to eliminate issues in security and data privacy. Private clouds offer immense benefits in terms of reliability, availability and scalability. Private cloud offerings from CtrlS Data Centers provide the best in class cloud infrastructures that can scale up or down according to varying application loads and operate your business without disruptions and latency. Full scale automation is a set of intelligent tools in our cloud infrastructures meant to provide efficiency in process cycles thus minimizing human intervention in fast changing application loads. Private cloud infrastructures in CtrlS are fully automated to simplify management tasks for administrators and users alike.

Private clouds are receiving much greater attention nowadays due to its unique benefits in narrowing the growing gap between business needs and in-house IT capabilities. Cloud computing systems offer a consolidated platform with immense benefits in terms of compute, storage, networks and servers for enterprises looking to outsource their IT infrastructure. Cloud solutions from CtrlS offer scalable private cloud platforms for enterprises to take care of their growing demands in sharing compute resources across multiple applications dynamically as compared to traditional environments which are static. Automated provisioning, orchestration and capabilities in self-service are the key characteristics of private clouds to address operational challenges and to handle automation at scale. In order to overcome virtualization challenges in complex IT environments, full scale automation from CtrlS is the most ideal solution for enterprises planning on private cloud deployments.

Given below are key private cloud strategic differentiators from CtrlS in relation to business agility:

1. Standardization : Standardization refers to the efficient use, management and maintenance of technology resources. Open cloud standards are available for enterprises by which they can move on or off easily.

2. Business agility : Agility in a private cloud accelerates the creation and provision of services required by enterprises. Business applications experience peak loads in their operations at certain times. Private clouds must allow business users to provision resources by themselves independently to handle resource requirements to use their applications while restricting access to authorized application owners.

3. Superior performance and resiliency : This feature ensures reliability and service availability in private clouds. Dynamic resource allocation strategy offers resilience and superior performance.

4. Resource Optimization : Leverages existing resources for optimal use in order to reduce costs.
Full scale automation in a private cloud transforms application resources, provisioning and de-provisioning of workloads, and also helps in migrations. In manual systems these activities would require days or weeks to accomplish, but now they can be accomplished within minutes. Service menus and standardized templates are readily available to reduce human error. Cloud automation from CtrlS also transforms SLAs and end-to-end performance by way of policy driven provisioning and built in analytics thus setting the stage for self-service capabilities. Recognizing the fact that many enterprises are adopting private clouds, CtrlS offerings on private clouds are intended to increase IT agility, maximize employee productivity, accelerate business and IT alignment, optimise resource utilization and reduce costs.

Salient Features of Full Scale Automation Differentiator

In CtrlS, multi-tiered IT services and support are delivered by NOC (Network Operations Center) help desks. Normally data centers while developing solutions for managing incidents respond to problems rather than to prevent them proactively. Some of the striking features of full sale automation services include,

• NOC Support : NOC support system automates incident ticket processing and prioritizing it for immediate response. Proactive problem prevention is one of the core functions in IT service delivery. This support is ensured in private cloud systems.

• Incident Lifecycle : When an incident occurs the processes are automated for resolution and classified for its severity with quality audit. It is highly important to note that incidents are often indicators of bigger problems or underlying errors. Hence any incident that may arise is handled with high priority to prevent further errors and problems.

• Customer Portal Data Flow : Data flow through servers and systems for voice data and network services are managed and measured for communications providers. Customer portal is automated to bring all functions under technical and non-technical areas for fully convergent billing solutions based on different types of service usage.

• Automated Provisioning for Cloud : Automated provisioning enables users to configure resources as per their application needs.

• Automated metering and Billing : Usage reports to clients and Admin is automatically sent with billing information based on resource usage. The user friendly interface allows better control on billing / metering.

• Service Automation and Alerting : Services are automated for load balancing, cluster and firewall management. Incidents or errors are sent through email or SMS to ensure timely intervention. Alerting is also automated.

• Automated Restful APIs : Restful APIs are a set of principles used to design web services that focus on usage of system’s resources such as how the state of a resource is addressed and the status is sent via HTTP to wide range of clients. This entire process is automated in the private cloud systems.

CtrlS Data Centers innovate constantly to improve the existing infrastructure with new features and services. To illustrate an innovation, in addition to the features explained above our data centers have planned to implement learning management system (LMS) solutions in the cloud and auto-correction and correlation engine to generate alerts sent by the monitoring team. The LMS shall provide training portal for real time scenarios supported by centers of excellence (CoE).

Full scale automation for private cloud systems in data centers is the most viable option for enterprises to overcome issues in reliability, protection, compliance, SLA and governance. Through full scale automation CtrlS attempts to overcome challenges in traditional data centers and offers full service capabilities by eliminating manual intervention in operations.