As we inch closer to 2016, your customers might be feeling overwhelmed by the surge of cloud options emerging in the IT space—from public/multitenant to private to hybrid infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments. Organizations are often confounded by this complexity when choosing a solution to meet best their IT infrastructure needs. That’s why we turned to our valued vendor, Peak 10, to leverage some of their knowledge about the three flavors of IaaS and the best way to present each one to your customers.
Here’s some fodder from the Peak 10 experts to help you become an IaaS expert:
Public/multitenant: In regards to IaaS, public and multitenant environments are essentially one in the same. That is, both environments are platforms that provide customers with on-demand cloud computing and storage. The public/multitenant environment is ideally suited to organizations that need infrastructure that can hyperscale, i.e., that can spin up services quickly and as needed. Additionally, this solution will support companies with workloads that require 100 percent uptime and reliability. As well, a vendor, such as Peak 10, will provide security and compliance features that are geared toward production-grade workloads. For instance, customers can take advantage of a solution that is inherently compliant with HIPPA.
Private: Unlike the public/multitenant environment, the private cloud is a dedicated computing and resources solution. That is, customers can utilize a private cloud vendor’s colocation services or, perhaps, even hosted private cloud services to deploy a dynamic, company-specific cloud infrastructure. Customers that would benefit from private cloud are large retail, healthcare or financial enterprises that need more privacy because they host sensitive data such as credit card numbers and personal banking/health information.
Hybrid: Hybrid IaaS is ideal for customers that just purchased on-premises equipment but are also looking to start slowly integrating cloud infrastructure. With hybrid, customers can place their own physical assets in a vendor’s colocation data center but also benefit from integrating elements of the public cloud into their own environment. As well, some of your customers may wish to continue hosting certain data on-premises for security reasons, while other data and applications can be allocated to the cloud to increase in-house efficiency and capacity.
So, what advice does Peak 10 have to offer about effectively communicating these benefits to your customers to find the best possible IaaS solution? For starters, encourage your customers to share their end business goal with you and, from there, work backward to identify the right IaaS solution that will help them achieve a positive outcome. Whether they want to improve security and compliance or simply want to begin transitioning to an entirely cloud environment, working with a vendor that provides flexible, tailored and round-the-clock support is essential to helping your customers achieve their goals.
To that end, the quality of the IaaS solution—whether public/multitenant, private or hybrid—all comes down to the dedication and expertise provided by its vendor. That is, partners should enlighten their customers about the deep customer service that comes along with implementing IaaS from a truly robust vendor.
Click here to learn more about selling Peak 10’s IaaS and other solutions through AVANT!