The IT landscape is extremely dynamic right now. "Cloudy" is probably the best way to describe it on multiple levels. How IT manufacturers, IT services companies like Varrow, IT organizations, and IT professionals respond to the cloud today will likely dictate their relevance tomorrow. We always try to empathize with our customers, but when it comes to the cloud, we can totally relate.
The way IT is delivered, consumed, and procured is changing. Get on board. Don't resist. Embrace the change before you're swept away by it. Our strategy as a company is to help our customers take advantage of this change and help them benefit from it. We want to make the cloud a sunny place.
It is not a wholesale transition and much of what our customers are doing today can be considered part of an overarching cloud strategy. Read an interesting blog from Paul Penny - the first in a series -- on the transformation of IT and how we can apply the spirit of the word "cloud" to our entire IT ecosystem: http://ppenny.varrowblogs.com/?p=69
Like our customers, Varrow has been gradually moving to the cloud within its own internal IT for some time now. We are smaller than our typical customer, so we have moved more quickly than most of them. Take a look at Jeremiah Cook's blog to see what we've done with the cloud for our own internal IT: http://jeremiahcook.varrowblogs.com/?p=185
I thought I'd share 3 of the BIG cloud-oriented items we discussed at our company kickoff:
1) Varrow Rescue -- this is Varrow's backup cloud offering. When we looked at where the best opportunity was for Varrow to provide a cloud offering that we could be "best in world" at, we landed on enterprise backup and recovery. Varrow Rescue in a nutshell:
- Fully managed enterprise backup and recovery solution
- Cloud replication available
- Self-service or SLA-based restores
- Industry-leading deduplication technology
- VMware and Hyper-V image level backups
- Comprehensive reporting
- 24 x 7 support
2) Varrow Cloud Tranition Pathway Services - Although we do have a powerful cloud offering in Varrow Rescue, our strategy is not to become a cloud provider. It is to help our customers envision, design, implement and manage their own clouds - maybe Varrow Rescue is one of their clouds, maybe not.
To that end, Varrow's Cloud Transition Pathway Services are a suite of services designed to answer the following kinds of questions:
- What applications and services can or should move to the cloud? When? How?
- What private infrastructure do we maintain? Where?
- How do we integrate and manage all of this? What help do we need?
- How does this change my organization, staffing, and skills requirements? Where do I start?
- How can we plan and budget in the midst of so much change?
3) Making a real Private Cloud - up until recently, the term "private cloud" had been more marketing than reality. A "private cloud" was really just the same stuff our customers had bought from us for years with a new name. Now though, the technology is much further along and there are opportunities to layer on additional capabilities and services to existing infrastructure and really start delivering IT more as a service to end-users. Varrow is very well-positioned to help our customer "cloudify" their existing IT investments with new technolgies in a way that is meaningful. For those of our customers reading this blog, reach out to your Account Manager or Technical Consultant to schedule some time for a deep-dive on the details of how we can help.
Cool stuff and lots more on the horizon.
Great blog post AJ. Good use of the term "cloudify". Its a great description of what we are trying to help customers take their IT infra.
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