by, Vidya Ravichandran, Founder and President, GlowTouch Technologies
The promise of cloud computing has been plastered on every industry and technology outlet imaginable. The word “cloud” itself is overused and often applied in disparate, and even contradictory, contexts. As technology professionals and service providers, it’s our job – our responsibility really – to filter through the marketing jargon, the sales fluff, and the rampant hype to fundamentally examine what the cloud, namely cloud-based infrastructure, can offer our business (and more importantly, our clients!).
It’s no secret that cloud technology has shifted the way many hosters approach their infrastructure planning challenges. Mounting pressure to “do more with less” and a fiercely competitive environment has forced the whole industry to become more savvy and resourceful.
A “rent-as-you-go” infrastructure is certainly appealing in today’s rapidly changing world. Cloud-based infrastructure allows hosting providers to leverage flexible, secure environments while keeping staffing lean and CapEx down. Plus, they provide improved speed-to-market, wide accessibility, redundancy, and syndication capabilities that traditional datacenters may not be able to offer.
However, while back-end infrastructure configurations produce legitimate concerns for service providers (costs, maintenance, support, etc.), the front-end customer experience must remain top of mind. Today’s market increasingly demands “always on” service and hyper-responsive support. Thus, it’s the obligation of service providers to explore infrastructure configurations that allow them to expand in new directions quickly while delivering superior value and service to their customers. The notion of hybrid and diversified cloud infrastructure has emerged as a recent and potentially viable consideration for service providers looking to exploit the cloud to their customer’s advantage.
What factors should you consider when evaluating your organization’s current and future infrastructure plans? How can hosting providers effectively service and maintain their infrastructure to deliver high-quality services to their clients? How will a purely cloud-based infrastructure impact your customers’ user experience? How can I find a partner to help me implement, upgrade and manage my changing infrastructure?
These are just a few of the questions that service providers must thoroughly examine in order to determine how to best configure their infrastructure in a way that lets them quickly and effectively respond to evolving customer demands.