Choosing Your Cloud PartnerThe value of selecting the right trusted business partner, and why Cogeco Peer 1 may be the best choice for your organization. DOWNLOAD eBOOK
Let's clear up something here at the beginning of your journey. Contrary to many discussions in the market, the cloud is not just one journey, but many.
Instead, think of the cloud as part of your mission-critical business strategy that is ever-evolving to drive your digital transformation. With many different IT deployments, you must shift and adapt in ways that make sense for your business. And as you optimize your IT environment, the cloud will also take new shape.
In reality, your workloads and apps move at different times, to different endpoints or cloud platforms. So your cloud journey is actually multiple journeys with multiple destinations.
As technologies change and new ones emerge, new destinations become available — empowering your business to transform. Some of your cloud journeys will end. Other journeys will start…
The one companion who is along for the journey, regardless of the journey you are on, is your data. Your data needs to be accessible, able to move between applications and locations on different platforms, efficiently. It must remain secure at all times, whether at rest or in transit.
So how do you navigate this cloud journey? How do you decide if your data stays on-premise or moves to colocation, if it gets hosted in a private cloud or in a hyperscale cloud? You navigate with the help of a partner — someone who guides you on your journey to many destinations. Someone who helps your business connect and secure your hybrid environment.
Remember, the cloud is not an "out of the box" option. Your situation is unique and requires careful planning and analysis. It requires a partner who has your back and who ensures you are positioned for success.
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Some of your workloads and apps:
Cloud has emerged as a platform that can unshackle IT from the manual efforts, processes and procedures of traditional legacy environments. It does this by creating highly secure, highly automated and highly agile hybrid environments designed for IT ease, management and accountability.
If your organization is just starting your cloud journey, the incentive is likely your need for greater agility and efficiency. And you need to enhance your ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions, and scale up (or down) at a moment’s notice.
Cloud computing has a number of benefits. If architected and deployed the right way with the right partner, cloud gives you greater flexibility, agility and control of your IT. It is typically more cost-effective, and is often used in a hybrid solution with hosted, collocated and traditional on-premises IT infrastructure.
Replace on-premise servers and storage with scalable compute and storage capacity on demand.
Save money by managing less internal IT infrastructure.
Provision servers and VMs in hours instead of days or weeks.
Create and deliver digitally enhanced products, services and experiences.
Get to market with new products and services before competitors.
Only allocate and pay for compute, storage and network resources that are actually used.
Many organizations think their journey is simply deploying servers and virtual machines into a cloud — whether it is Azure, AWS or their own private cloud. But the cloud is a lot more complex than just spinning up a virtual machine. The cloud journey simply begins there.
According to industry research firm IDC, digital transformation will soon reach macroeconomic scales. By 2021, at least 50 percent of the global GDP will be digitized, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations and relationships.
Collaboration and access to information is key. Brainstorming a new idea or business concept — then testing it and rolling it out in weeks, days or even hours — is the pace that business innovation is occurring at today. Cloud is the enabler of this new speed of innovation.
If your business is typical, you likely will not migrate everything to the cloud, and certainly not in one move. You will keep some of your compute, storage and network resources on-premises and host some of them in the cloud in a hybrid IT environment. The cloud is an evolution — workloads move and are optimised. Again, it is not simply a case of moving from A to B.
This is the traditional deployment model in which end users employ an IT department to manage IT assets — hardware and software — owned by the company. With the exception of firms born in the cloud, virtually 100 percent of businesses use this deployment model.
The practice of using a third-party data center for the housing of servers and other IT devices is called colocation. End users retain ownership of the servers but use the building, connectivity, power and security services of specialized providers.
In this deployment model, vendors not only provide the data center facility, security, power and cooling, but also the servers and required storage. This allows for a high degree of customization and control, with predicatable costs. It also provides access to managed services to look after your infrastructure, network, operating systems, hypervisors and databases.
Cloud is about leveraging the power of network and IT assets to their maximum effect. This potential brings complexity with it. Whether it is private cloud (on-premises or hosted in a data center), public or hyperscale – important decisions will need to be made around IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. There are many paths in the cloud, and unmitigated complexity can impede decision-making.
Network connectivity must be a pillar of a hybrid solution. The ability to move data efficiently and securely across a hybrid environment and achieve the low latencies necessary to unlock the full potential of cloud is vital. Having this holistic view of a hybrid environment that includes connectivity will enable cloud investments to be optimised and should be a view shared by you cloud partner.
On your cloud journey, you will likely need a guide to complement your existing IT staff with professional IT services. A good partner helps you manage your journey to the cloud by helping you make sense of complex hosting environments and connectivity deployments.
A partner also helps you prepare for and then migrate applications and data from on-premises to public, private or hybrid cloud. A partner can assess options and help you determine the right platforms for each workload – cloud or otherwise. They can architect, design and build a solution including connectivity and security in these phases.
Further, your cloud partner can provide expert project management and be able to plan and execute the migration of data and application to a new environment, then be able to handle the ongoing management once it is live.
In essence, a partner on your journey to the cloud extends the power of your technical teams with deep expertise in technologies and processes that help you achieve strategic business outcomes.
We help you navigate through the many cloud computing platforms to choose from. We help you make sense of IT complexity.
Cogeco Peer 1 is a trusted partner to all sizes of business — small, medium and large — helping them use the cloud to access, move, manage and store mission-critical data worldwide, backed by superior customer support.
“Cogeco Peer 1 ensures resources are available so we can add critical components such as processing power, memory and new clusters as and when we need them. This elastic scalability allows us to respond to client requirements in real time. They have provided a solid foundation for expansion of our operations in the UK and now also in the US.”
Michael Wright
CEO, Striata
“We invited several service providers to the process, but it was Cogeco Peer 1’s technological superiority, coupled with their proactive attitude to customer service that made us select them. Of course, we evaluated all the facts from all pitches, but Cogeco Peer 1 wrapped an impressive team around us and we felt that ‘anything was possible’ with them.”
Michael Søby
IT Governance and Sourcing, Bang & Olufsen
Cogeco Peer 1 helps your organization and IT team design, build and manage hybrid IT solutions optimized for your unique business environment. This enables you to focus on what matters most: powering transformation, driving growth and delivering exceptional experiences to your customers.
With managed services spanning cloud, hosting, colocation, connectivity and security, we offer our customers the choice and flexibility combined with international reach, deep technical expertise and exceptional human support.
You will get a consultation at no charge from a Cogeco Peer 1 cloud expert, and you will be provided with an initial set of recommendations and action items.
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