Event Review: Cloud Café Event (Uxbridge)

The Simplify IT team have enjoyed meeting with our customers this Spring; taking time to discuss and understand their Cloud journeys and challenges via bespoke Cloud briefing sessions hosted in Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Manchester, and yesterday in Uxbridge.

As the sessions continued, we couldn’t help but notice a set of recurring themes are emerging around Cloud adoption:

·Business leaders are tasking IT to implement a “Cloud First Strategy”

·Services and applications are being moved to the cloud without backup, resilience and SLA’s being fully catered for in the way they would be on-premise

·IT are finding public cloud expensive and are struggling to control usage, billing and the resulting spiralling costs

·Many developers continue to consume AWS and are charging to their personal credit cards, whilst the business is accelerating towards Microsoft Azure due to the success of Office365

These themes are the real world challenges our customers are encountering, so Simplify leveraged our close relationship with NetApp to tackle these head on.

The most satisfying success from our briefings has been the changing of customers perceptions around the value NetApp and Simplify IT can deliver. NetApp were originally recognised as a hardware/storage vendor. Across the course of each briefing our customers have shifted mindset to understand how NetApp have transitioned to a cloud software provider, integrating with the key hyper-scalers such as AWS, Azure and Google.

NetApp spoke about their ‘Data Fabric’. A marketing term, but one which refers to the consistent approach of their private and public cloud software. Their portfolio of Cloud solutions allows businesses to run and operate in the public cloud with the same look and feel as NetApp on-premise whilst benefiting from the storage efficiencies and controls traditional on-premise NetApp users enjoy today.

Our customers have subsequently learned how NetApp’s approach will control Cloud costs, simplify administration, assist DR & Business Continuity, and meet the longer-term back-up and restore needs of their SaaS applications.

We were all in agreement that a ‘Hybrid-Cloud First’ solution is the best and most flexible choice for most organisations. NetApp continues to provide world class manageability and cost per GB for your on-premise private cloud, especially when combined with Hyper-Converged Infrastructure such as FlexPod or NetApp’s HC-I. The Data Fabric approach and Cloud portfolio then allow businesses to extend into their choice of hybrid, multi-cloud hyper-scalers and SaaS as required, on an application or workload basis.

I’d like to thank NetApp for their incredible backing and support of Simplify IT and of course to our customers, both for their investments of time but also their openness in discussing their Cloud challenges and goals.

You can find out more about these solutions and gain advice on how to navigate your journey to a fully optimised Hybrid-Cloud via: Cloud.netapp.com, via the learning centre at SimplifyIT.co.uk, or by contacting us at sales@simplifyit.co.uk