Cloud Computing: Jumping into the Cloud
August 29, 2011
The Verizon acquisition of Cloud Switch is tremendous validation for solution providers in the cloud enablement space and confirmation of the need for cloud onboarding tools to help lower the barrier to entry for businesses looking to adopt cloud services. Migration tools and services are always critical for driving adoption of any new technology, as consumers seek to migrate to the new from their legacy technology.Often times, the more disruptive the technology, the greater the need, and cloud is no exception in this respect. Mid-tier and enterprise businesses especially are looking for ways to streamline the onboarding process and minimize their risk around cloud adoption, as they have significantly more sunk costs than an SMB. By providing automated solutions to enable the migration of these businesses’s existing servers, MSPs and cloud providers will increase service adoption, drive revenue, and reduce costs in multiple ways…
First, automated migration solutions allow MSP and cloud providers to reach out to new customers such as mid-sized businesses and even large enterprises who have invested considerable time and expense into building time tested server configurations and don’t want to have to start from scratch. As most of the growth in the public cloud market to date has been focused on small businesses, attracting these established businesses with their larger IT spend is key to any cloud providers long-term growth strategy.
Second, migration solutions like CloudSwith and our own product DynaCenter do can help increase existing customer adoption of a MSP or cloud provider’s services by making it easier and more cost effective to migrate existing applications. Automated solutions for migrating existing servers reduces the customer’s cost, effort, and risk enabling them to focus on how to get the most value from leveraging cloud services as part of the foundation for their IT service catalog.
Third, migration solutions can reduce the time it takes to onboard customers by as much as 90 percent, reducing internal costs and helping improve customer satisfaction and retention. Instead of building a new server from scratch or using manual processes and scripts to migrate solutions, customers can migrate their server workloads in minutes using automated processes and tools. This means that customers are more likely to complete their migration project which leads to higher customer satisfaction and retention. It also frees up MSP and cloud provider staff to focus on high value initiatives rather than onboarding servers.
And finally, MSP and cloud providers can leverage cloud to cloud migration capabilities to onboard customers from other cloud providers. This enables them to offer competitive upgrades and attractive pricing to woo customers from other vendors who may not be maintaining acceptable customer satisfaction levels. Providing an automated migration path from a competitive cloud platform to their own platform means the end customer doesn’t have to factor in the time and cost of a manual rebuild and migration when making their decision. It also protects end customers by eliminating concern over vendor lock-in, which can be a sales inhibitor.
All in all, when you consider that average customer spend on cloud services ranges from $1,000-$12,000 annually, providing a server migration solution at a fraction of that amount (or even at no cost) is in every MSP and cloud provider’s best interest.
With Racemi, MSP and cloud providers can provide physical and virtual onboarding and migration services for their cloud or hosted services with minimal effort and expense. It requires no infrastructure in the end customer’s environment and can be easily integrated into a providers control panel. In addition, we don’t introduce any virtualization tools or networking infrastructure and we don’t incur any additional performance overhead on customer servers.
For every other business and enterprise we support the migration of both physical and virtual servers to public cloud providers like Amazon, Terremark, Rackspace and GoGrid. By supporting a variety of major cloud providers out of the box, as well as all of the major hypervisors platforms (Hyper-V, VMware, and Xen), Racemi can support a wide range of end customer migration needs. We’re big believers that moving to cloud computing needs to be as simple as possible.