The problem

So far, your Enterprise must invest regularly so that it sets up and maintain its information system, whose functionality, performance and stability are critical:

• critical to its success (a good IT can be a competitive differentiator),
• critical to its survival (without IT a company disperses its know-how and disorganizes).

As director or IT administrator, you must then regularly buy, install and deploy new servers on-site ; for this purpose, you either contract an IT services company, or your own IT service if it is large enough and competent.

Once these servers run, you must then maintain them: change hardware pieces which fail (with the associated risk of data loss) and apply software upgrades&patches which correct OS or application security bugs. Then again, an IT services company or your IT department is sollicited many times.

Many kinds of servers can currently exist in your Enterprise:

• mail server (Microsoft Exchange, Linux sendmail / Postfix, IBM Lotus Notes Domino...),
• web server and applications server (Apache, Microsoft IIS, Tomcat, IBM Websphere, Oracle/BEA Weblogic...),
• database server (Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase...),
• file server (Windows Server, Linux Samba, NFS...),
• business specific server,
• CRM server (Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft),
• ERP / SCM server (SAP, Sage, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics),
• ...

The solution

Save on IT services, hardware and licenses by moving your servers into the Cloud.

Audit your information system, and identify the set of your servers which could be migrated into the Cloud.

Select the best Cloud Computing provider corresponding to your needs for this migration, and plan the cost study, quickly foretell the ROI you can hope for.

This migration, which can be undertaken progressively, allows you to suppress hardware and IT services linked to these servers.

For instance, by moving your Microsoft Exchange mail server into the Cloud, you suppress the need for important hardware and administrator staff on site for running and maintaining it.

Another example, a database server hosted in the Cloud can start around €100 per month (vs. thousands of euros currently if we consider: server purchase or rental, software licenses, and system admin costs).

Regarding software licenses, server licenses are often cheaper in the Cloud, and can be consumed on demand (if demand is intermittent, you can save your Cloud server state, and turn it off; when switching it back on, its state is restored, and it is again "up&running" within minutes. You only pay the consumed hours).

Finally, service availability is guaranteed by contract with the Cloud Computing provider. For example, you can benefit of a SLA of 99.95%, that is less than 5-hour downtime per year. You should compare this with the unavailability periods that you probably suffer already... And if this contractual limit is exceeded, the provider pays you back up to 10000% of service interruption time (depending on agreement)!

Therefore, you easily save the high availability issue of your servers and you do not care anymore about hardware (this is the provider's responsibility).

Some providers even take care of software upgrades themselves.

Contact us to learn more.