Learn more about Cloud-A at http://www.clouda.ca
Cloud Services and Cloud Hosting For Managed Service Providers
It’s making less and less sense to have expensive tech hardware on-site. Why pay thousands of dollars upfront for servers and other costly equipment, and then pay more over time to bring in an IT guy to fix the inevitable problems, when you could instead pay a more affordable monthly fee to remotely use someone else’s servers?
That’s the cloud in a nutshell. It eliminates the need (and cost) of housing and maintaining servers on-site We spoke to Geoff Sullivan, Channel Manager of Cloud-A, to learn more about what advantages cloud providers offer businesses.
“I come from the managed service provider world, that’s what I did prior to coming to Cloud-A,” said Sullivan. “To be honest, we didn’t really [use] the cloud at the organization I was with last, we were still very hardware-dependent. When I got the introduction to Cloud-A, I really saw the value that a solution like this can bring to managed service providers, and that’s why I made the switch to this side of the fence.”
Cloud-A is part of a movement that is revolutionizing the tech landscape in Canada. Each of its founders have over a decade of experience in the field, and in that time they learned a lot about what is wrong with the IT industry. Too many solutions are overly expensive and inefficient. Cloud-A provides cloud solutions that can cut companies’ IT costs and give them more control over their capabilities.
Now, Cloud-A isn’t the only cloud service provider in Canada, or even Halifax, but they are one of the most innovative. This is especially true regarding OpenStack, which is an open source global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists to produce the best possible cloud computing environment.
“We were Canada’s first OpenStack Cloud in 2012,” Sullivan boasted. “We are OpenStack visionaries, that’s a bit of a brag, but we were featured in the OpenStack summit at the main stage in Paris in November.”
France… very fancy… when Cloud-A isn’t sipping wine and slurping down escargot in baguette-country, what are they doing exactly?
“We ensure that our hardware is up and running and performing well and secure, and we ensure our OpenStack platform is doing the same,” said Sullivan. “So we’re very channel partner focused. We rely heavily on our channel partners to do implementation services, ongoing managed services, for both the clients and the end-users that we acquire.”
“Our users and our partners are able to add, remove, and change their infrastructure by themselves without having to call a help desk. It truly is on-demand and it truly is self-serve. [There is] no buyer lock-in, no contract. We really believe in openness. We believe that if you sign up for our cloud, use what you need to use, turn it off when you don’t need to use it, delete it if you don’t need it, you won’t be charged for it… You’re only paying for what you’re using.”
That’s something you can’t do near as easy with on-site, physical servers. With on-site servers, you have to try to strike the impossible balance of not paying for too much hardware, and at the same time buying enough hardware so that you don’t find yourself scrambling for additional servers when you need them, and then waiting what could be a long time for them to arrive. Allow Sullivan to explain in further detail:
“You’re only adding infrastructure as you need it, as your client page grows. So, it’s more justifiable as far as cost goes… The ability for you to have full control of the infrastructure without having to talk to a third party, a far as adding infrastructure, changing networks, adding networks, adding routers, firewalls, it’s all right at your fingertips.”
“One other thing is more proficient procurement. I can remember the days, from my previous life [working in the MSP world], we had a customer who signed on the dotted line, ready to move forward, and he asked ‘When is my server going to be here?’ And, you know by the time you work out distribution and things like that, you’d be lucky if you get it in days, and in a lot of cases it’s weeks.”
The reasons keep piling up for businesses to ditch their on-site servers and transition to the cloud. It’s not only cheaper, but also a more effective and flexible solution. Kudos to Cloud-A for providing the best cloud solution available in Canada and further helping their clients by not locking them into contracts.
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