Cloud Providers Must Spill Clients’ Secrets
Whether cloud falls under the bailiwick of IT or a business operation, gaining insight into data about usage, security, and other key metrics is an important – but sometimes difficult – capability to glean.
In fact, about 60 percent of 275 infrastructure and operations professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore said lack of operational transparency, compliance information, and support hinders them from expanding their cloud adoption, according to a Forrester report commissioned by cloud service provider iland. Of those surveyed, 51 percent said they had a hard time getting documentation about their provider's compliance status to meet an audit, while 42 percent found it challenging to get information about their own compliance status.
Getting access to data proved a business benefit to SmartNet North America, a services division of hardware vendor Leica Geosystems. When company headquarters wanted to increase services revenue and expand into new markets such as agriculture, SmartNet knew it could no longer rely on either corporate IT or departmental IT resources to provide customer support around-the-clock, Tyler Collier, product manager at SmartNet North America, told Enterprise Technology. Prior customers primarily operated in the work-week, from 9 to 5, but the new model required new resources – resources SmartNet could not develop internally, Collier said.
"Agriculture is the big push as we move forward. During planning and harvest season they're working 24/7 during two or three weeks, and that season slides [geographically]," he said. "For that two or three month period, 24/7 is required. It means our infrastructure has to be able to support this."
Like many enterprises, however, SmartNet did not want to commit capex to buying more servers, networks, and hiring the service personnel necessary to meet customers' needs, so the department researched cloud service providers before interviewing three finalists, he said. The department ultimately selected iland, based on its "interview, pricing, and service offerings," Collier recalled.
"We wanted to find somebody we felt good about with [end-user] support because that was key to our offering," he said.
Also crucial: Delving into SmartNet's cloud usage to promote better planning and customer service. Cloud metadata unlocks a lot of insight into enterprise behavior, said Lilac Schoenbeck, vice president of product marketing at iland, in an interview.
"As a cloud service provider I can tell you, this information is available to us," she said, noting that iland built a portal so it can share this data with customers.
Source: iland
Knowledge promotes accuracy in billing, said Schoenbeck. It also enhances security, especially in shadow IT situations, Alon Maimoni, chief marketing officer at cloud network firewall developer FortyCloud, told Enterprise Technology.
"We've encountered a company, quite a big one, which … is a classical shadow IT case where the guys from operations went ahead and created their own networks and spun up a lot of servers and that company ended up with several thousands of computers and big, big networks and all of them are not connected to IT because IT couldn't keep up with the pace of what was going on it that organization," he said. "How can you control security in an organization with thousands of computers and close to 200 networks and make sense of what's going on?"
In this company's case, after locating all its networks and assets, the company used FortyCloud's solution to make its public cloud private, protecting corporate assets while retaining the departments' agility and flexibility, said Maimoni.
