No One Cloud Fits All

There is a trend in telecom to sell products, not solutions. We mistake technology for a product (think SD-WAN or WebRTC). We have been on the cloud ride for a few years now, once again forgetting that cloud is a term that covers a large swath of services.

At COLOTRAQ, we have been trying to figure out how to help partners deliver strategy to their customers’ cloud ideas. Many businesses have ideas about cloud, like that it is cheaper or panacea for all things IT. An arena of product replacement that works well for selling bandwidth does not translate well in the world of IT.

MPLS is almost 20 years old but many still do not like it or understand it. Now we are pushing Hybrid WAN and a hybrid IT environment in the marketplace. That isn’t going to go well without training, support and expertise.

Cloud breaks MPLS. Many businesses utilize Microsoft Office365, Salesforce and other SaaS services along with computing platforms like Amazon AWS and MS Azure. Most of the traffic is outside the WAN, over the Internet. Carriers today offer direct connections, while data centers have peering/inter-connection fabrics to directly access these providers (Google, Amazon and Microsoft).  This mix of connectivity and breadth of services of the IT landscape today necessitates assistance from experts to ask the right questions; point out opportunities and risks; and contribute to putting a plan in place for the business with its goals in mind.

Unfortunately, not every business can afford to hire a Network Solutions Architect or Cisco CCIE to map out the environment. For one thing, there are a limited number of these skilled individuals; and for another, people don’t thing they need that kind of help. At COLOTRAQ, we beg to differ. We think that relying on the talent and experience of partners – master agencies like ours and 400+ vendor partners, 100 of which are cloud providers – is how we deliver a great service to our customers.

Not every situation is the same; not every solution will be the same. There needs to be a holistic understanding of what the business is trying to accomplish; what their business goals are; and what outcome would be most satisfying. In most cases we have to conduct a Cloud Readiness Review coupled with an IT Risk/Cybersecurity Assessment in order to deliver an optimal solution that makes sense for both their IT and business unit decision makers.

Those questions require more information that is filled out in a standard request for proposal (RFP). It may be that the customer has colocation and wants to get rid of it to save money, but after careful consideration some software won’t port well or the control will be lost or other unforeseen factors may actually be a problem for the cloud transition.

Businesses do not always examine the skills gap. Running your own boxes is different than distributing the software over virtualized environments. Tools and skills are different for hybrid environments.

Are there compliance needs or security concerns? Who is handling data backup? How is it handled? Is there redundancy? Should be institute data duplication? How critical are certain pieces? Not only is there a service level agreement but what is the uptime?

The outage at Amazon S3 that took down about one-third of the Internet left many CIOs wondering about their own environment - and where the weakest link lies. Some systems are customer facing; some are mission critical. How are you handling those systems? These questions and more go into a cloud readiness review. Not to break the sale, but to assure the customer that we have his best interests at heart; that we have done this before and can identify the gotcha; and that his strategy has been tested.

The reality is there is no one size fits all in the world of data center infrastructure. In fact many CIOs/CTOs are deploying certain elements of their IT infrastructure in physical environments and others on the cloud and everything in between. COLOTRAQ's experience coupled with the breadth and scope of its global network of vendor partners, gives us capabilities that span across the entire data center spectrum ranging from wholesale and retail colocation, managed hosting, all the way to private and hybrid cloud. Many of our vendors can develop custom cloud environments that will provide all the benefits and scalability of the public cloud without any of the security risks and reliability issues. That makes us perfectly positioned to help any client deploy in any type of environment anywhere.