Business, Industry Disruption and Technology Evolution

Modern Business Landscape

Transforming your business model is no longer a choice. It’s a must have strategy, where technology is vital to success. IT is no longer a department and a cost center, it should be closer to the business, or it should be the business enabler. The evolution over the years transformed IT from reactive, to proactive, to automated and now, finally it’s a business tool that will determine the success or survival of your business.

Digital transformation is a journey, an ongoing process of new procedures, new culture and new technologies. These three factors simultaneously have a positive impact on the business by optimizing operations, empowering employees to improve business deliverables, transforming products and services based on market data and helping engage customers in the sales cycle. It involves collecting data from all possible sources. Analytics help businesses build value and competitive advantage based on data. Cloud computing is the prerequisite to success.

Cloud computing and its unique capabilities offer technology as-a-services and enable you to engage with your customers, adapt to demand and unexpected circumstances in real time, empowering a 24-hour business. Leadership and team have agility, can innovate and can have the right tools in place and be able to lower cost at the same time.

Public Cloud, Local Data Centers and on-premises IT

Enterprises now have the choice not to buy and manage their own IT infrastructure and outsource to the Cloud and Private Data Centers. Enterprises move to Private Data Centers and to the Cloud because they can’t scale inside their own data center and some still don’t have a disaster recovery plan.

The cloud benefits are very important and necessary; technology, financials, business, scalability, seasonality, technology on-demand, time to market and off course lower costs.

I see that there is a lot of confusion between utilizing a local Private Data Center here vs Public Cloud. Many people I have been speaking see these two as competitors and not as complementary and this is one of the most frequent questions I’m asked!

The optimum is to engage both, depending of course on the business and technical needs.

Businesses can enjoy the benefits such as simpler maintenance and improved scalability, by combining local data center services with worldwide cloud leaders.

Our Value Proposition: Extent your local Data Center Infrastructure to the Public Cloud

Businesses may need local presence for a number of reasons. There are regulatory and compliance reason depending on the type of Industry you are in. It may be a must to have IT presence in the country to be compliant. Those who need presence in the EU may be based in Cyprus due to attractive taxation and the country’s standard of living, low crime and geographical position; between Asia, Africa, the Middle East and EU off course. For example the local authority offering Brokerage and Forex license is the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) and the process is not simple.
Utilizing a local data center which can extend to the public cloud in a unified, high available and secure architecture is a great advantage for the following reasons:

• Local Presence, complete potential skill gaps with a personalized approach;
• Point-to-point connections, member of the local internet network, no dependency on international Internet;
• Guaranteed network latency at local network levels;
• Flexibility: Colocation and Bare-Metal;
• Easier to control costs;
• DR office available. Designated office to work;

Combining the above benefits of a local data center with the public cloud increases the benefits even further by offering:

• Global presence;
• Economies of scale;
• Rich product offerings;
• Unlimited scalability;

Microsoft Azure Stack HCI

The hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the preferred way to deploy servers in the datacenter and the preferred way to lower costs, improve performance and availability, and simplify operations. In short, HCI is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the elements of a traditional data center: storage, compute, networking and management. With HCI you can Build a private cloud, Extend to the public cloud and build a hybrid cloud!

Microsoft has recently announced the new Azure Stack HCI – a hyperconverged infrastructure host operating system delivered as an Azure service, seamlessly connecting to Azure public cloud.

You can run Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) in the datacenter or at the edge using existing tools, processes, and skill sets. It consists of between 2 and 16 physical and validated servers running a specialized operating system purposely defined for hyperconverged infrastructure. You can then extend your datacenter to the cloud with Azure Backup, Azure Monitor, and Azure Security Center.

Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/overview

There are many use cases for Azure Stack HCI and the most popular are: Data center consolidation and modernization, Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Highly performant SQL Server, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Disaster recovery for virtualized workloads and Scale-out storage.

In my opinion every business is unique and has its own optimum architecture. Relying 100% on technology hosted in-house or cloud only may not be ideal. Engaging a local Private Data Center can bring the advantages of all worlds together and be the local hub to multi-cloud and hybrid, while at the same time offer the flexibility, cloud economics, OPEX and IT as-a service.

Having clarified the importance of a Private Data Center, you should choose very carefully with whom to cooperate with. Certifications show the quality verified by third party authorities. A Tier III facility guaranties uptime, ISO 9001 quality management of internal business processes and ISO 27001 the information security standard. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is necessary if you are handling credit cards.

There should be Service Level agreements in place and 24x7x365 support operations are a must have to minimize risk and speed up recovery.

Feel free to contact me any time to discuss your cloud and datacenter modernization at +357 25 022900 or email me at tt@cl8.com

Theodosis Theodosiou
Business Development Manager