Cloud delivery and subscription economics has created technical and commercial opportunities to increase your margin for SLAs, such as:
Backup has become highly commoditised and for basic services the price point is trending to zero. Differentiation is key to avoid a cost only conversation.
Disaster Recover
Disaster Recovery is aimed at the business level recovery of IT services, which builds naturally on backup and restore capabilities. Friction free setup and ease of ongoing use are the key attributes for success.
Business Continuity
Business Continuity encompasses the whole business, not just technology. The scope to differentiate becomes much larger, with detailed domain knowledge playing a key role.
rhipe works with a number of leading cloud technology vendors who have products in the DR/BC space:
Back-up and recovery, Azure Site Recovery and consumption based scale-out resources in the event of a disaster.
Support multiple platforms (physical/ virtual/ mobile devices etc.) and offer options for an on-premises deployment.
NetScaler GSLB provides load balancing and sophisticated DNS automation for failover/ DR scenarios.
Multi-data centre availability, network link layer redundancy and support for Microsoft Azure hybrid deployments with flexible DRaaS options.
– Provides flexible and scalable IaaS platform without ownership and global footprint with no ‘on-net’ data charges supporting large DR/ BCaaS data volumes and geo-replication
High SLAs built into core offering with additional enhanced back-up and restore available through Acronis and Skykick.
Subscription licensing allows service providers to build core hosted environments billed on a flexible, ‘as-used’ basis.
Subscription licensing allows service providers to build core hosted environments billed on a flexible, ‘as-used’ basis.
Full integrity of the underlying hosted platform used to deliver BCaaS/ DRaaS with tools focused on back-up and recovery of virtualised environments.
Offer cloud-based disaster recovery services that seamlessly support your customer’s vSphere environment with vCloud Availability Services.
DR and BC is no longer purely a technology issue. With the reliance on IT across the business there is now a much more comprehensive set of stakeholders including:
The Board
Has a fiduciary duty of care, skill and diligence with respect to the business
Finance
Costs have historically been the challenge in the cost/ benefit equation. The finance department could now be a key advocate instead of a blocker.
IT
Even with the scope of Business Continuity reaching beyond technology, it is likely that a significant number of the activities will still fall to the IT function to implement.
Line of Business Managers
Day to day operations are where disasters are first felt. At the basic level they just want to keep the business running.
Licensing the mirror infrastructure can be complex depending on the specific configuration. It may be possible to utilise the clients existing licenses, but it may also require additional licenses. The subscription programs from vendors such as Microsoft SPLA , VMware and Citrix allow you to align costs with usage.
Understanding this shift from technology to business led decision making and delivering solutions that are closely aligned to these three business outcomes will be key to the ongoing success of technology suppliers and cloud service providers.
Sales
Provisioning secondary infrastructure on-demand and with OPEX costs
Risk
Disaster Recovery rehearsals as part of offering
Costs
Extend services to whole of business through Business Continuity