Closing the cloud gap by mike donaldson, vp of hosting dot com
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This document discusses closing the "cloud gap" faced by many mid-market IT organizations. It outlines five steps to closing the cloud gap, including adopting a lifecycle perspective that puts enterprises on a path to the cloud. It then details Hosting.com's managed cloud hosting services, which provide a mission-critical application deployment starting with good design and leveraging a unique hybrid architecture. Hosting.com helps customers move their data and applications into a customized cloud using proven methodologies.
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Closing the cloud gap by mike donaldson, vp of hosting dot com
- 1. CLOSING THE CLOUD GAP Mike Donaldson VP Marketing HOSTING.com
- 2. AGENDA • The Cloud Computing Revolution • Cloud Computing Challenges • Five Steps to Closing the Cloud Gap • About HOSTING • Q&A 2
- 3. THE BOOK AVAILABILITY REVOLUTION “British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle, a trend it described as a renaissance of reading.” 3
- 4. THE SOFTWARE AVAILABILITY REVOLUTION “More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online.” “All of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.” “Software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software- powered start-ups in many industries.” 4
- 5. Q What is Cloud Computing? A “That’s When My Application Runs in Someone Else’s Datacenter” Q How Important is Cloud Computing? A “We’ve Gone From Prohibiting Cloud Applications To Moving As Many of Our Applications As Possible into the Cloud Because It is So Much Faster and Cheaper Than What We Can Do Ourselves.” Senior Security Architect Top 5 US Bank 2010 5
- 6. NOT ALL CLOUDS ARE FLUFFY AND WHITE 6
- 7. MANY CIOs ONLY SEE STORM CLOUDS 7
- 8. ARMADA GROUP SURVEY IDENTIFIED “CLOUD GAP” IN MIDMARKET IT SHOPS 8
- 9. HOSTING, CLOUD COMPUTING, MANAGED SERVICES AND SOFTWARE ARE CONVERGING Managed • Expertise Service Providers • Labor Capacity (MSPs) Cloud • Agility • Geographies Traditional Infrastructure-as- • Economics Hosting • Recovery a-Service (IaaS) • Redundancy Software • Automation • Integration 9
- 10. MANAGED CLOUD HOSTING SERVICES FOR MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS Professional Services Application Support Services Security & Compliance Services Availability & Recovery Services Managed Cloud Foundation 10
- 11. LIFECYCLE PERSPECTIVE PUTS ENTERPRISES ON A PATH TO THE CLOUD 11
- 12. MISSION CRITICAL APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT STARTS WITH A GOOD DESIGN 12
- 13. UNIQUE HYBRID ARCHITECTURE LEVERAGES EXISTING RESOURCES 13
- 14. WE MOVE YOUR DATA AND APPLICATIONS INTO YOUR CUSTOMIZED CLOUD • Database Migration • Data Migration • Image Migration • Linux Migration Proven Methodology Reduces Risk and Time Dedicated Resources Reduces Customer Effort 14
- 16. AVAILABILITY AND RECOVERY SERVICES PROVIDE RESILIENCY 16
- 18. EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE WITH REGULATORY COMPLIANCE • Level 1 PCI Certified Since 2009 • One of First Managed Cloud Services Provider to Be SOC 2 and SOC 3 Audited • HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) Friendly 18
- 20. OPERATIONAL SCALE 20
- 21. GARTNER MANAGED HOSTING MAGIC QUADRANT MARCH 2012 Says Hosting.com’s Strengths Are … Cloud Assessment Professional Services Application Dependency Mapping, Migration Assistance and Onsite Capacity Testing VMware vCloud Data Center Certification Advanced Storage Area Network (SAN) Capabilities Hypervisor-Based Cloud Replication VMware's Site Recovery Manager 5 (SRM) Internal Data Centers and Customer Premises Sites Use Cases E-Business and Web-Based Application Complex Managed Infrastructure for General- Purpose Workloads 21
- 22. OUR CUSTOMERS TELL OUR STORY BEST 22
- 23. THE HOSTING BOTTOM LINE Lifecycle Approach Predictable Mission-Critical Operating Applications Remain Costs Always On™ Unique Managed Hybrid Services Architecture Extend Your Comprehensive It Team Yet Modular Layered Portfolio Security Options 23
- 24. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS? 24
- 25. CLOSING THE CLOUD GAP Mike Donaldson VP Marketing HOSTING.com
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for meeting with us today. We know your time is valuable and appreciate the opportunity to present a closer look at ourManaged Cloud Hosting SolutionsWe hope this is informative and helpful
- We have a brief agenda today – First we’ll provide background on this cloud revolution and the challenges that present themselves with this new frontier. Then we’ll show you how HOSTING addresses those challenges with a unique approach in the marketplace, and the benefits of that approach. We’ll look briefly at case studiesThen wrap up with our company story and why we’re proud to be associated with HOSTING. Transition Statement: So let’s begin today by talking about books.
- This article appeared in the UK from The Guardian in August (2012)It shows Amazon announcing that Kindle eBook sales have overtaken physical book sales in the UKNewsworthy in UK because digital books had only been available for 3 years in that countryBut here’s the real story buried in the article: Kindle users are purchasing 4x as many books as they did before their Kindle!So, in other words, there is a revolution in the book business -- an explosion in demand for books Made possible by the shift from the old physical media to the new digital media. It’s a huge opportunity, if you’re in the book business, as long as you’re in the digital book business. If you’re in the physical book business, it’s obviously a threat; but, for thepublishing industry, eBooks are gaining high market share in a growing marketplaceTechnology is a strategic disruptor, even for “old school” industries.Transition Statement: Now why are we talking about books? Well, a similar revolution is happening in the software business and IT business,which is what we’re all here to talk about.
- Here is an article from the Wall Street Journal last year. This is Marc Andreessen, the inventory of Netscape Navigator, the original web browser, who also is now a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He wrote an opinion piece called, “Why Software Is Eating The World.” And, basically, he says: “More major businesses and industries are run on software and delivered online.”And the point he’s making here is this isn’t just software companies. These are companies in all industries incorporating software into their core business model. Why? because it’s now possible thanks to THE CLOUD.He says: “Six decades into the computer revolution...all of the technology required….finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.” Again, we’re talking cloud computing.He continues:“Software programming tools and internet-based services make it easy to launch global software-powered start-ups...” And we’re seeing that. With both new companies as well as new software initiatives in existing companies.Finally he says: “With lower start-up costs and expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired.” This speaks to the huge increase in demand for these software applications, as well as the supply that’s made possible by all those internet-based services.Transition Statement: So let’s take a minute to regroup and define cloud computing in its simplest form.
- As great as Cloud Computing sounds, it’s not all a bed of rosesAmazon Web Services is one of the best-known cloud providers, and they’ve had ongoingproblems with outages and their customers have had problems with outages. Here is a recent article about a dating website that is moving to another service provider because they don’t know how to keep their Amazon service up and running. Amazon does, in fact, give you a lot of options for providing things like high availability, but you have to design it, build it and migrate it all yourself. Their product is, by definition, self-service, which means a lot of the actual work is left to the user and administrator, the customer, even though the service is in fact cloud-based.Transition Statement: Not as easy as your CEO or CTO has been led to believe. And when we talk to CIOs, we realize that many of them, when they hear “CLOUD” they think stormcloud because they see these headlines.
- A typical midmarket CIO has spent years getting the architecture to the point where it is now --- where everything pretty much works on the last generation of technology.Andhere comes a whole new generation of technology which is better. The question is: How do I get there? All my resources are currently used up for the existing technology. From a strategy standpoint: Where do I start? How do I architect? How do I phase this? There are no real “how to” manualsFrom a budget standpoint: I’m already spending 70 percent of my budget just to maintain my current systems. I don’t have a lot of money left over to implement anything new. From an people standpoint: All of my people, all my processes, all my tools are optimized for my existing architectures – largely client server and web-based architectures. Where am I going to get the expertise I need to move to the cloud?. Plus, my current team is already full-time busy. It’s actually smaller than it was a couple of years ago. How can they do everything they’re doing now and manage a new cloud, too?Security, the #1 issue with cloud computing according to everything I’ve read: How am I going to make sure this stuff is secure? It has to be because I don’t want my company or customers at risk, and I have to deal with compliance. [If appropriate for audience: I’m in an industry that’s heavily regulated. We’ve got things like PCI or HIPAA to worry about. How do I make sure those apply to my cloud architecture?]From a vendor managementpespective, as a midsized company, I don’t have the resources to manage a lot of vendors, especially new ones.And then I’ve got all myexisting legacy systems. They are in production and they work. The only thing missing is they’re not cloud-based. Anything I do in the cloud is going to have to coexist or, even better, inter-operate with these pieces of my architecture that already function. How am I going to make them work in concert?And then, finally, results. Results is key, especially in this tough economic environment. It’s not about investing money just to buy into some new architecture. Anything that I do has to either increase revenue or reduce costs for the company. How do I do that with the cloud?TRANSITION Statement: Which brings me to what we call the Cloud Gap…
- The Armada Group, an IT advisory service that specializes in mid-market computing trends, did a survey of 200+ mid-size organizations. They studied CIOs of midmarket companies, and this is a nice summary of the situation with cloud computing: 92 percent of them see the business value of cloud computing. So that’s good. That’s the good news.However, only 20 percent of them have a specific plan to get to the cloud,due to the obstacles we discussed previously. So we call that delta between the 92 and the 20, the “cloud gap”. This Cloud Gap is evident in all those organizations that see clear business value in this new computing model but have not developed a plan to realize that business value. Transition Statement: And that’s where the Hosting.com story comes in. Our mission is to help companies fill that gap.
- There are four forces that are converging to satisfy the mid-sized customer’s management of applications:Traditional HostingMSPCloudSoftwareWe are delivering these four factors in our solution set today
- The way we do that is by providing managed cloud hosting services for mission critical applications. These services come in a sort of layered approach. We start with our managed cloud foundation, which is our managed compute, storage and networking resources hosted in multiple data centers around the US.We layer on top of that our extensive availability and recovery services, which are essential for mission critical applications to keep them running. Next is security and compliance services, which are also essential for cloud computing because, as we discussed earlier, security is the #1 issue. Then, we add in additional application support services – whatever is necessary to meet our customers’ requirements. And then our Capstone is a set of professional services --- because cloud hosting isn’t just about ongoing operation; you have to get there and you have to do other one-off projects along the way. [needs clarification]Transition Statement: These building blocks are, we believe, critical to providing a solid managed cloud service, however there’s one more component that is quintessential - we call that our application-driven approach
- So starting with your business opportunity , you may be at a crucialdecision pointHosting.com is able to give you the ability to design a cloud solution, build it, migrate your existing systems and data to that solution, manage them on an operating basis, and then protect them from all the threats that can happen on the internet, resulting in your cloud-based application.If your organization has the resources to handle one or more of these phases itself, we are happy to fill in the missing phases to get you to the Cloud. In fact, while we offer a comprehensive portfolio of products to cover the entire cloud enablement lifecycle, we package them so midsized companies do not have to go through an all-or-nothing, big bang transition to get to the Cloud.Transition Statement: Okay. So let’s drill into each of these five phases a little bit. I’ll show you how we take a holistic view of your business,support the businessfor long-term growth, and leverage your current investments
- When we go into design, the core concept here is that a mission critical application starts with a good design, so we put a lot of effort into the design piece. We do this through a discovery process in the normal sales process. In fact, that’s probably why we’re here right now as part of that process. In addition, if you have larger or more comprehensive requirements, we offer paid professional services options and go into more depth during this phase. But, basically, what we do is start by understanding your business requirementsThen look at what sort of resource requirements you’re going to need, what kind of technology or technical requirements you have. A lot of this comes into existing installed basethat we potentially want to leverage. And then, from all those, we can develop a custom cloud proposal for you that will tell you exactly what we’re going to provide inthat cloud architecture. One of the nice things about this custom proposal is, at this point, we can tell you exactly how much it will cost every month. So the economics are very different than with either do-it-yourself or self-service cloud. The cost model is predictable. And it’s also all operating costs; there are no capital expenditures required.Transition Statement: Okay, so that’s design. Once we’ve architectedour design, the next phase is the build phase.
- One of the ways we’re able to do that is when we build our architecture, we have several different kinds of servers to choose from and we have the ability to use those servers in any desired or necessary combination. So you may have heard of “public cloud” and “private cloud”. We offer both of these solutions. Public cloud is where your workload is shared with other companies. That’s called “multi-tenant”. It is very cost-effective; in fact, it’s the most cost-effective way of using the cloud. Some people don’t want to do that, though. They have strictprivacy or compliance issues where they need us to provide a set of servers running cloud virtualization only for their company, so we can do that, too. That’s called private cloud. But there also exist software and systems that cannot be virtualized. It either doesn’t run on the necessary Intel processors and operating systems or it is allergic to virtualization software in one way or another. And so we have the ability to incorporate dedicated servers and also even co-located servers into our overall cloud architecture. That allows us to incorporate a lot of legacy systems.But this isn’t the end of our server story. Different parts of a complex application architecture may work best on different server types. Unlike some providers who use a “one-size-fits-all” approach, we can mix or match any of our server architectures into a single hybrid environment. This is a very unique capability and is particularly usesful for incorporating existing legacy systems into a Cloud environment.Anecdote:One of our customers runs an AS400 in our data center in a co-lo cabinet. It’s connected via the local network to their cloud so that, effectively, that AS400 is part of their cloud, which is a very unusual capability. Virtually no cloud provider wants to touch an AS400 unless they have both co-lo capabilities and the ability for that co-located system to be on the same local network segment as the cloud pieces. So this is really important for leveraging existing investments and taking advantage of those legacy systems.Transition Statement: Okay. So that was build. Once we’ve built it, it’s not unlike building a new house. Once the contractor is finished, the next step is to call a mover and move in. In the cloud world, this is the equivalent of our migration step. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Available both Public (Multitenant) and Private (Dedicated)Dedicated Servers Support SoftwareThat Does Not Virtualize WellColocation Supports Legacy SystemsHybrid Combines of Any of the Above
- We have a professional service capabilitythat will plan,implement and test the movement of your data and your applications into your customized cloud. So there are basically fourtypes of migrations that we do. We can move data, we can move SQL databases, we can also do VM image migrations, and we can also do Linux migration. And the nice thing about this is we have a proven methodology for doing this. We do this kind of thing all the time, as opposed to a typical company that would only do this once. So we have depth of experience. We can both reduce the risk and the time. And, also, we have the resources that can do this. So if you don’t have extra staff with time on their hands – which is the case most businesses – we can provide the people to help execute the migration. Transition Statement: So that’s migration. Once we have the environment set up and we have all the data and applications ready to go, the next step is to turn it on and to manage the entire system.
- Another way to look at our managed services is from the customer experience perspectiveIn this diagram, we have our cloud environment in the bottom left. We have your mission critical application in the top left. We have your administratorson the top right. Those administrators interact with their Hosting.com infrastructure three ways. They either work through our Customer Portal, they work through our Entourage technical support people, or they deal with their relationship manager, as I mentioned previously. The rest of the people on the diagram – all the people in network operations who actually operate all the systems on the left, as well as our Centers of Excellence who provide all the expertise necessary to identify issues, resolve them, identify issues before they become problems, those sorts of things these teams are all there in the background to support you. So, from a managed service standpoint, this is where you see that Hosting.com really becomes an extension of your current IT Department. You get all the expertise. You get all the extra labor. You don’t have to add any more people.Transition Slide: Next I’d like to call special attention to our Customer Portal and show you why it’s a key part of our architecture.
- The first capability that we offer under protection is high availability and disaster recovery High availability is all about providing redundant capabilities so that the failure of any one component won’t cause the entire system to go down. Not everyone has all the exact same requirements or the same budget for availability, so we offer a variety of availability levels you can choose from.Disaster recovery is for the scenario where something happens to the entire site, and that’s where you put in capabilities to failover to an alternate site. And that can range from just doing backups to having real-time replication of data so that you can effectively switch over immediately. But like with availability, one size does not fit all, so we offer a number of choices for you in this area to meet your requirements and budget.Transition Statement: Another part of protection is security. When it comes to security, we like to talk about our “security onion”.
- So think of your data and think of the middle of the onion and multiple layers of protection protecting that middle of the onion. Specifically, we offer a combination of physical security and network securityThrough those two capabilities, we are able to prevent external attacks guard your data wherever it goes – whether it’s at rest or in transit;\\ detect problems are they’re occurring and mitigate the effects of those problems as they’re occurring as well.Transition Statement: While Cloud security is important in its own right, it is particularly importance to companies subject to regulatory compliance – our next topic.
- We have extensive experience with all of the major regulatory compliance bodies.PCI, for instance, we have been Level 1 PCI certified since 2009. PCI, of course, is critical for anyone doing credit card processing. It’s required. If you don’t have it, you’ll lose your ability to process credit card transactions.SOC 3 is a relatively new standard, but it is the successor for one of the original standards in the hosting world, SAS 70. We were one of the first managed cloud services providers to complete the SOC 2 and SOC 3 independent audits. Our SOC 3 information is publicallyavailable. Our SOC 2 report is available to you under NDA.And then, also, if you’re in the healthcare industry, HIPAA mandates specific guidelines that affect our business. Hosting.com provides the necessary services for customers in the healthcare industry to comply with HIPAA security requirements and standards. Our data centers and secure hosting services have been a key component to support our healthcare customers in satisfying their HIPAA security requirements.Hosting.com has partnered with Trustwave, AlertLogic, Symantec and Juniper, to offer you a framework of security services to help achieve HIPAA compliance.So what we do is provide the building blocks that help our healthcare customers meet HIPPA compliance. Transition Slide: So those are our five phases. It’s maybe easiest to summarize the benefits of our approachwhen you look at our customers and the kinds of things that they’re doing – with our support.
- There is a misnomer that in the world of cloud, location doesn’t matter. That’s absolutely not true and it’s really for two reasons: One is when you’re planning for disaster recovery, it’s essential that your recovery site be somewhere physically, geographically different from where your primary site is. So… A). it means you need to know where the primary site is and B). it means you need to be able to choose a different location for your backup site. This is true whether your primary site is at Hosting.com or whether you’re doing it yourself and we’re just providing the recovery site.The second factor where location is important is if you were taking advantage of the co-lo or the dedicated server capabilities to incorporate legacy systems into your cloud architecturea lot of times it’s really convenient to have that data center physically somewhere near you so that you don’t have to travel too far to visit your servers.Now I mentioned enterprise grade cloud foundation. We do fill these data centers with the best products that the top companies in the industry – people like EMC, VMware, Juniper, F5 – provide. These are the same products that the biggest Fortune 500 companies are buying and using, and they use these productsbecause, even though it’s expensive, it’s the best you can buy. You know, EMC hardware just doesn’t go down like cheaper storage devices do. And, frankly, a lot of the other hosting providers choose to go the cheaper route and use a more commodity approach to hardware. We don’t do that.Transition Statement: And our 6000+ customers are very happy about that.
- To give you some idea of the scale we operate…of our 6,000 customers, 35%are international. We manage over 5,000 physical servers, over 5,000 virtual machines. We implement about 8 million security patches annually. We monitor 45,000 systems. We have over 200 certified cloud experts on our staffOur NPS score is typically much higher than the industry average – most of our clients would refer us to other people.Transition Statement: And while our customer referrals are most coveted, we are also respected by IT research and advisory firms, such as Gartner.
- We are a Challenger in Gartner’s latest Managed Hosting Magic Quadrant. Here are some of the things they’ve said about us. They really like our professional services. They like the fact that we are VMware vCloud Datacenter certified, which many hosting providers are not; our advanced SAN capabilities; our hypervisor-based cloud replication capabilities for disaster recovery, which is based on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager 5 product, (although we’ve made significant enhancements to VMware’s native application so we can meet our customers needs.) And Gartner recommend us for e-business and web-based applications, and also what they call complex managed infrastructure for general purpose workloads. We talked about focusing on mission critical and Gartner has picked up on the fact that we have high-end capabilities to satisfy those higher-end requirements.Transition Statement: So now we want to summarize. We talked earlier about those CIOs, looking at the storm clouds, asking themselves how they can justify cloud or get a cloud strategy. Let’s review those “storm cloud formations”…..
- We have, as you can see, a wide variety of customers, a wide variety of industries and a wide variety of application types: web-facing applications, e-commerce applications, SAS applications for people who are effectively delivering software as a service, back-office applications which are internal-facing but they’ve chosen to deploy via cloud and internet technologies. Transition Statement: Now for a little more company background.
- To wrap up, let’s quickly revisit the seven storm clouds we mentioned earlier and see how HOSTING addresses all these issues. [note the slide reads like a clock – start at noon, work your way around clockwise]Strategy - Lifecycle Approach Provides Comprehensive Plan forCloud EnablementBudget - Financial Model Provides Predictable, CAPEX-Free Operating CostsPeople - Managed Services Extend the Expertise and Capacity of Your IT TeamSecurity & Compliance - Layered Service Options Address Your Specific RequirementsVendor Management - Comprehensive Yet Modular Portfolio of Managed Cloud Hosting ServicesLeveraging Legacy Systems and Existing Investments - Unique Hybrid Architecture Incorporates Existing Systems Into Your Cloud ArchitectureBusiness Results - Availability & Recovery Services Ensure Mission-Critical Applicationsyou count on the drive revenue and reduce expenses Remain Always On™
- If you are interested in working with HOSTING to get to the Cloud, the next step would be to schedule a discovery session. We will want to start by understanding your business requirements. When are you available? This program is very popular and slots are filling up quickly!CAN I ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS OR CLARIFY ANYTHING YOU’VE SEEN TODAY?Thank them again for their time.
- Thank you for meeting with us today. We know your time is valuable and appreciate the opportunity to present a closer look at ourManaged Cloud Hosting SolutionsWe hope this is informative and helpful