Cloud services for IT cost management
In this story, we describe one of the essential benefits of deployment of corporate cloud services.
Imagine a multinational corporation / group of companies with several divisions operating in Central Europe. They provide comprehensive services to ensure perfect operation in the field of Facility Management. Their customers do not have to worry about functioning facilities, so they can focus on their business. This company provides data centre infrastructure as a service, and their cloud services become a tool for efficient IT costs management.
How and why it all started
The company decided to move to cloud services. The main reasons for this were significant financial savings, relieving internal IT, and a focus on the main systems. The company also intended to have a clearly defined service availability - SLA.
Their first choice was the public cloud, where the company faced difficult and time-consuming solutions to problems. Even the highest available level and paid support service did not help. The company did not receive any response regarding a solution, or the deadline was determined according to the provider's priorities.
The virtual machines travelled as part of the provider's HW upgrade without warning. The control of the portal environment, which was constantly changing, also proved to be problematic. Administrators had to learn the new administration, due to the changes in the admin environment. The helping scripts they created then stopped working as the changes were deployed.
The customer's objective and motivation
After a short period of public cloud operation, cost analysis was performed. The conclusion was that costs were about 30% higher than they had been "on paper”, so they started looking for possible cost savings possibilities.
At the same time, they needed a reliable partner with whom they could communicate and "fine tune" the services provided, solve possible problems, look for alternative solutions, etc.
A key and decisive feature was the ability to develop a model breakdown of costs for individual companies within the group that are managed and controlled by the central IT. This contributes to the efficient use of resources within the group and individual divisions. It also creates space for the application of synergy effects and close inter-company cooperation.
Interesting facts from the project
The project was exceptional because it was the largest database of all DataSpring customers that the company managed. Undoubtedly, the challenge was to stand the test in the face of the customer’s previous experience with cloud solution operations.
At the start of the project, we could not avoid the instability of the virtualization platform. We solved specific customer requirements, fine-tuning everything, and so the environment is now controlled and stable. The customer began with the Resource Pool service, now they have moved to a more convenient model of combined IaaS and PaaS services.
Customer experience, service benefits
The customer perceives the current solution as transparent, predictable, easy to manage, and with lower costs – which can be further broken down into individual divisions of the company. Customer satisfaction has led to further demand for cloud services, such as the development of applications in Docker, located in the DataSpring cloud.
Which DataSpring service does the customer use?
The customer uses a comprehensive data centre infrastructure in the form of the Iaas service. This is computing power based on virtualization, storage, and connectivity, using the PaaS software infrastructure with the award-winning SQLaaS IT product. These services are suitable for all companies who are considering restructuring, optimizing internal IT costs, evaluating the efficiency of operation in the public cloud, or who require cloud services in compliance with the EU or Schrems II ruling.