PLEASE NOTE EVENT DATE CHANGED TO January 19th
This whole cloud thing and positioning every IT consumable “…. as a service” has interesting implications for IT professionals and IT solution providers. I work for a solutions provider and we have to look at these new consumption models, understand the benefits and pitfalls of them, and put together a plan of how to address these models and leverage them ourselves. Now, I am not saying I think everything is ready or should be a service that’s consumed over the Internet or that building an “internal cloud” is critical to running an IT shop these days, but I do believe that ignoring that these models exist is only going to get you (and me) in trouble.
We have decided to embrace the concept and leverage it where it makes sense and test out the waters. In doing so we’ve come up with new support models where we’ve centralized some of our support functions and have leveraged some tools that make remote support more realistic and economical for customers. We’ve also built out a suite of services that we felt our customers may want to leverage to be more efficient with their IT spend and IT resources as you can’t hire an expert in every subject matter, so leave some of the “support stuff” up to us and focus on the more business specific functions that can make your company better. We’ll help keep the wheels on the bus, but we need you to drive it somewhere business relevant. The services we started with are:
- Infrastructure Monitoring and Management
- End User Service Desk and Device Support
- Managed Cloud-based Data Protection Services
- Hosted Email and Collaboration
- Internet Security
- Infrastructure as a Service
All the services we built have some “cloud” element to them in that we are serving some aspect (if not the entire service) remotely. All of them use our Remote Operations Center (ROC) for centralized support, provisioning and monitoring and some of them are hosting applications and/or data off of the customers premise as well, e.g., Email, Data Protection, IaaS.
We are going to discuss some of the impacts of this new way of consuming IT services at an event we’re holding in Denver on January 19th at Mile High Station. It will be a great place to discuss with your peers what’s working and what’s not and enjoy some social time at the happy hour we’re hosting after the event to network a bit. Click here to sign up: http://www.lewan.com/events.
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