PRIVATE VS
PUBLIC CLOUD
Introduction
3
Definitions
3
Economic Drivers for
Public Cloud Adoption
4
Applicability of Economic Drivers
to Private Clouds
6
Hybrid Clouds
7
Organisational Drivers and
Addressing Buyer Objections
9
Summary
11
What Makes a Great
Cloud Service Provider
12
About Us
13
INTRODUCTION
The economic imperatives that drive businesses to adopt cloud-based
solutions are powerful and well known.
These are often treated as applying equally to public, private and hybrid clouds. However this is not necessarily the case. Superficially, private cloud appears to carry a number of advantages over public cloud in terms of security of data, location and jurisdiction guarantees. Private cloud enables organisations to avoid paying for a service provider’s profit margin and the cost of having another party involved. With these advantages, why should private clouds not dominate? Are hybrid clouds not a solution for all the problems of private and public clouds?
This whitepaper challenges these assumptions and investigates the economic and organisational business drivers of adoption of different cloud technologies. It also considers the future prevalence of different types of cloud technology in IT purchasing budgets and the corresponding impact upon service providers. With this whitepaper, service providers will be armed with an educational view of the advantages and disadvantages of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions. It helps to reinforce the business advantages of a public cloud solution.
1. These definitions differ slightly from the NIST definitions at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf but not to an extent significant to the argument.
Public cloud
1 – a bank of cloud resources managed bya service provider, located in its datacentre and shared between customers.
Private cloud
1 – a bank of cloud resources managedby an organisation, and used only by that organisation. It is irrelevant whether it is ‘on premises’ or not. This isn’t a distinction of who owns what building, but of what resources are shared and of who manages what. Just as the organisation might not own its head office building, the physical datacentre might belong to someone else, but the management and operation is done by the organisation concerned.
Hybrid cloud
1– a particularly ill-defined term thathas many definitions. In general it means something on the spectrum between public and private clouds.
DEFINITIONS
Cloud technology often suffers from poor definitions.
ECONOMIC DRIVERS FOR
PUBLIC CLOUD ADOPTION
The fastest-growing segment within the ITO market is cloud compute services,
which is part of the cloudbased infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment, according
to Gartner. Cloud compute services grew 48.7 percent in 2012 to $5.0 billion, up from
$3.4 billion in 2011.
2Whilst these are predominantly demand-side factors, they also provide supply side savings for the operator of the cloud as the transaction costs in service changes, predominantly labour and time to revenue, are
largely removed.
Public Cloud Supply Side Drivers
For a service provider offering a public cloud, solutions where a customer can be using and paying for a large amount of services one day, and a tiny amount the next day, risk causing resource planning issues and inefficient resource utilisation. This risk can be mitigated if there are sufficient customers on the platform to allow the peaks and troughs of each customer’s usage to even out in aggregate. Technically speaking the customer is taking advantage of the service provider’s ‘statistical gain’. Recent GigaOM Pro research showed that among
277 companies moving some work to a public cloud, 59 percent cited cost savings as their primary motivation3.
So, what are the economic drivers causing adoption of public cloud? What makes a cloud platform more cost effective than alternative technologies?
There are nine main drivers for public cloud adoption that, listed together, almost spell ‘cucumber’. These can be conveniently divided into:
Demand side drivers – factors making it more attractive for the end user to buy; and
Supply side drivers – factors making it more economical for the service provider to use the technology.
Public Cloud Demand Side Drivers
On the demand side, there are two main factors: 1. Utility pricing – IT end users purchase resources on a utility basis. This allows them to consume cloud resources the same way they would electricity, gas or water. The end users can buy as much or as little as required often resulting in the service provider offering pay-as-you-go billing, backed by appropriate metering and rating.
2. Elasticity – end users want elasticity for the ability to scale the service up and down as rapidly as necessary. Together, these factors provide demand side economies for end users as they only purchase the services necessary, and only when required.
2. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2108715 3. http://pro.gigaom.com/2012/05/public-private-or-hybrid-a-guide-to-moving-to-the-cloud/ $3.4 Billion
$5
Billion
2011 2012Why Select a Public Cloud
C
ost Effective: More cost-effective than a custom deploymentU
tility: Paid on a utility basis, pay as you use modelC
ommodity: Provisioned at scaleU
niversality: Homogenous service componentsM
ulti-tenancy: Enabling more than one user of the same resourcesa
B
straction: Virtual resources abstracted from physical resourcesE
lasticity: Rapid provision and deprovisionR
eliability: Built for failureStatistically, one can predict with confidence that if a service provider has sufficient customers, the chance of over-utilisation becomes sufficiently small to ignore. Capturing this statistical gain relies upon four supply side factors:
1. The service is provisioned at scale so that each element is small compared to the service as a whole. This is often referred to as ‘commodity’ provisioning; 2. The service is multi-tenant so resources can be shared between customers;
3. The service is built from universal homogenous service components (as opposed to components specific to each customer) to facilitate this sharing; and
4. The service abstracts the services provided from the underlying physical assets (the main technique here being virtualisation).
These supply side factors acting together reduce the cost of providing a service to customers – when compared to non-cloud solutions such as traditional hosting, or to the cost of the customer providing the service in-house. This cost reduction would typically be passed in part to the customer and in part retained by the service provider as profit. It is worth noting that virtualisation alone provides at most two of these elements. Whilst virtualisation has thus driven changes in technology already, virtualisation will not deliver the full cost savings of a public cloud solution.
David Clarke, MBE, CEO of the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, supported this statement by writing in a CIO article, “[Costs] will be higher for virtualisation as it involves a considerable amount of work in setting-up and customising, while the provider of a cloud service has already borne these costs.”4
Public Cloud Demand and Supply Side
Lastly, service providers can cope with failure at a software level, rather than investing in expensive hardware to protect against it. More specifically, conventional IT uses an approach of minimising the rate of failure of any given component, often by the use of duplication of components, custom backplanes and application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). It then relies on this low hardware failure rate to deliver consistent performance.
In a cloud environment, rather than attempt to build hardware that never fails, cloud architecture accepts that hardware components will fail, and ensures that the software and applications running can handle this. This avoids the use of expensive custom hardware, preferring cheaper commodity hardware instead, and building into the application the possibility of hardware failure. Thus the service provider can deliver reliability in a more cost effective manner. This is both a supply-side and a demand-side factor that also makes public cloud solutions more attractive than alternatives.
4. http://www.cio.co.uk/article/3367146/virtualisation-versus-a-private-cloud/
How Does ‘Statistical Gain’ Work?
In mathematical terms, the Central Limit Theorem sets out that if sufficient uncorrelated instances of any statistical distribution are added together, the result will look like a normal distribution. And the more instances are added, the lower the standard deviation will be. As the usages of different customers are broadly uncorrelated, one can predict with confidence that if a service provider has sufficient customers, the chance of over utilisation becomes tiny. This scale is achieved not because any individual customer is large (indeed self-correlated customer usage is the enemy of statistical gain), but because the cloud is multi-tenant and has multiple customers.
5 17 30 Sum of 5 occurrences 50 175 300 Sum of 50 occurrences 500 1750 3000 Sum of 500 occurrences
Private Cloud Demand Side Factors
Take the two most significant factors: elasticity and utility provisioning. In a private cloud model, superficially these two factors still seem to hold. Let’s take a
typical example:
• The finance department benefits from establishing more number crunching capacity to process end of quarter figures.
• The HR department benefits from the ability to increase resources during a recruitment drive.
• The marketing department benefits from being able to scale up their web presence as and when required. However, these savings are predicated on the organisation’s private cloud having the capacity to cope with these peaks and troughs in demand. But, for all but the largest5 of
IT departments, this is an unrealistic prospect. IT departments of more normal size must over-provision, or more accurately cannot under-provision if they still want to offer elasticity and utility in the same way that public cloud providers do.
They face a choice:
• Upset customers by not offering meaningful elasticity and utility provisioning; or
• Offer elasticity and utility provisioning at an unsustainable cost base, possibly one greater than a non-cloud solution.
Private Cloud Supply Side Factors
Turning to the supply side factors, it is a simple economy of scale argument. True multi-tenancy requires more than one customer. Whilst private clouds may have more than one internal customer, the number of customers is smaller than generally required to achieve the economic benefits of a public cloud. As a result, no private clouds, except for the very largest, are likely to offer the same economic benefits as a public cloud.
Analysis
Are there really no economies for the private cloud operator? Of course not. For example, adding selfprovisioning may reduce transaction costs. Using universal homogenous service components may decrease sparing inventory costs (though virtualisation may be enough to achieve this in an enterprise
environment). Cloud software techniques, such as taking advantage of scalable database technologies may reduce costs.
However, these have to be balanced against the costs to the enterprise of implementing the private cloud, such as a hardware refresh, training IT staff, orchestration software and the management and hardware overhead of operating an in-house cloud solution. In a service provider environment these costs are spread over a far wider customer base.
The differences in scope and scale between the service provider and the private cloud operator mean that a service provider can cut down costs of provision of service, but an organisation with a private cloud cannot do so to nearly the same extent.
Service Provider run Private Clouds
We have assumed in the above section that the private cloud is operated within the organisation rather than outsourced to a service provider. Most, but not all, of the economic drivers listed above are contingent upon the scope and scale that result from multi-tenancy; after all, giving someone else the controls is not likely to produce a magical increase in efficiency. Therefore we would expect private clouds operated by a service provider to benefit from few advantages beyond those operated by the enterprise. However, there will be some limited benefits (for instance economies of platform management, and in staff familiarity with the technologies).
APPLICABILITY OF ECONOMIC DRIVERS
TO PRIVATE CLOUDS
5. Large is an organisation with sufficient scale that they could operate as their own service provider, perhaps the IT departments of FTSE 250 companies, for example.
One of the key ingredients to provide a cloud management solution to support the requirements of not only the business, but also the customer. These requirements include the capability to:
Deploy quickly to reduce the time to market
This is of pivotal importance as cloud service providers all try to capture the $30 billion market opportunity quickly. This will enable customers to buy cloud services in the shortest possible time. Service providers and hosting companies excel at providing services, not building software. They need a solution to get to market quickly and easily.
Manage resources
Using a cloud management solution that allows you to view, filter, organise and manage your resources, be they physical or virtual, in a manner that suits you and your business will help you achieve greater efficiencies and responsiveness.
Automate common repetitive tasks
to free up time
The cloud management solution should reduce the operations staff’s time spent on repetitive activities that add little value to your service quality. Automating these repetitive tasks frees up highly skilled staff to concentrate on higher margin activities and deal pro-actively with more complex issues. The benefit is improved margins for the business.
Scale, reliably
Confidently know that your cloud management solution can grow with your IaaS platform as customer numbers and usage increases.
Support additional routes to market
To move up the value chain, or to offer more than commodity products, select a cloud management platform with built-in white labelling and a reseller system to allow the setup of a reseller channel and address new markets.
Deliver application solutions quickly
and easily
Seek the capability to easily create, manage and deploy sophisticated application templates.
Offer flexible and differentiated billing
and metering solutions
As you expand with an IaaS offering, look for a management platform that has a full-featured, integrated billing system to provide a complete solution depending on a companies existing capabilities up to and including measurement, rating, invoice line generation, invoice generation and credit card collection facilities if required.
Provide a highly customisable user interface
Select a cloud management platform that includes a highly customisable user interface. Every business and customer is different and has different skill levels, so allowing each to dynamically reconfigure and customise the user interface to suit their requirements is important.
Offer role-based access control
Ensure the solution allows access control to enable your end users to scale their usage. By supporting multiple users and groups within each customer account, you can allow different groups of users’ access to different sets of resources securely.
Deliver a single pane of glass view
Check for a single pane of glass view to allow users seamless control over multiple clusters, diverse hardware, storage and hypervisors. Ensure it is hypervisor agnostic and provides this multi-cluster support.
Under the definitions above, we set out that the term ‘hybrid cloud’ is a slippery term. It is used to indicate a point somewhere on the spectrum between public and private cloud, but otherwise suffers from a lack of clarity of definition. Hybrid cloud might refer to one of the following models:
1. Usage of both private and public cloud elements for provision of a single IT function dependent upon demand.
2. A combination of a public cloud and non-cloud technology (for instance traditional dedicated physical resources).
3. Clouds where the resources are to some extent dedicated to one customer and to some extent shared, perhaps including some improvement on resource allocation algorithms; these are often called ‘virtual private clouds’.
Model 1 – Usage of private and public cloud
elements based on demand
The first of these models is ‘cloud bursting’. This is where an organisation uses an internal private cloud in combination with an external public cloud as and when internal resources are insufficient. The theory is that by using a private cloud to handle a ‘base load’ of IT demand, the enterprise gains the advantages of a private cloud. The theory suggests organisations still benefit from the ability to provision in an elastic and utility manner, as the ‘bursting’ is not performed frequently and overall costs are thus not particularly sensitive to such bursts.
In practice, however, the benefits are difficult to achieve and gains often illusory. Take the finance, HR and marketing scenarios set out previously. Assume that all services are running on a fully utilised private cloud as a component of the hybrid cloud. Each of these departments requires a need for more IT resource. The increased demand causes a requirement for public cloud. So what happens?
• The finance department requires more number crunching capacity to process end-of-quarter figures. But the department may be uncomfortable with market sensitive data being shipped outside the organisation.
• The HR department needs to increase resources during a recruitment drive. However data protection legislation may prevent the HR department from storing CVs in a different jurisdiction.
• The marketing department needs to scale up their web presence to meet demand. However the department will likely already be using external web hosting as it is far cheaper than internal web hosting, so there are no gains to realise.
Common sense suggests that when resources scale, they will need to have access to the same data whether stored in the private or public cloud. This data will normally only be in one place, meaning cloud bursting solutions have the additional overhead of replicating and synchronising data.
What does this scenario tell us? It tells us that rather than taking a technological approach and dividing IT resources by volume consumed (in other words saying hybrid cloud works because public cloud will take the peaks, whereas in house resource will take the base load), what is actually likely to happen is that organisations will divide the location of IT resource according to
application and function.
Model 2 – A combination of a public cloud
and non-cloud technology
Rather than split each IT service between internal and external provision, the organisation will adopt the common sense approach of outsourcing service by service, starting with those which are the easiest to move wholesale to a public cloud and where the most gains can be made (for instance those with few regulatory burdens where demand is unpredictable), and ending with those where there is the most difficulty in moving and the fewest gains.
HYBRID CLOUDS
If private clouds provide few of the economic benefits of
public clouds, where do hybrid clouds fit into the puzzle?
Those ‘difficult to move’ applications are frequently the ones which are also problematic to move to private clouds, whether this is for regulatory reasons (for instance enforced segregation of data between departments) or technical reasons (for instance dependency on legacy databases and applications).
Thus, at least for a transition period of many years, organisations will adopt a mixed strategy of public cloud and conventional IT. But that mix will be split by platform or application – not with some service platforms split by volume, half in the cloud and half not.
Whilst we accept that the approach of having some applications in the public and private cloud is one use of the term ‘hybrid cloud’ and that common management is useful, there are few economic advantages flowing from it above and beyond those flowing from the use of public and private cloud technologies.
Model 3 – Some resources are dedicated some
are shared
The final hybrid cloud model is more useful. Offering services where the resources are to some extent dedicated to one customer and to some extent shared is useful for both technical and organisational reasons.
IT services are typically provided using a variety of closely coupled platforms. It may be that some of these are more suitable than others for moving to cloud technology. Allowing a single service to be provisioned across
platforms provided in a diverse manner (some on a public cloud, some using conventional IT), but managed by a single organisation allows the enterprise to adopt cloud technologies more easily, and removes objections that are linked to specific technical or regulatory concerns – or more accurately reduces those concerns to those which would be present with any IT outsourcing project. Here the split is by service component rather than by service, but the service is offered by a single service provider, most likely from the same datacentre. A typical use case might be a legacy application that has front-end web servers which sit well with cloud technology, but is backended onto conventional databases which is better suited to dedicated servers.
This model also includes improvements to resource allocation strategies in public clouds. Such improvements, made to facilitate provision of measurable and enforceable service level agreements are not really ‘hybrid clouds’, but ways of fixing public clouds. This semantic point does not detract from the usefulness of the model.
Analysis
‘Hybrid cloud’ is an overloaded term. Whilst there is little practical value in ‘cloud bursting’, enterprises may take a service-by-service approach to adoption of public cloud. Provision of ‘virtual private clouds’ and dedicated resource within public clouds may ease this process.
ORGANISATIONAL DRIVERS AND ADDRESSING
BUYER OBJECTIONS
The elephant in the room here is organisational change. If all the economics of private
cloud are not adding up, why are enterprise IT departments raving about it?
Enterprise IT is notoriously slow at adopting technologies that have been used by service providers, and in some instances, by consumers for many years; consider how long for example corporate employees had to put up with VPN based email and calendaring, while the consumer just used his iPhone. The reasons for this are numerous, but include:
• Organisational change resistance.
• Asymmetric risk/reward profiles – no one congratulates the CIO that makes transactions 10% quicker, but if 0.01% of transactions fail as a result of that change, the CIO gets fired.
• Cultural factors.
• Vendors deliberately making change painful through lock-in.
There appears to be a particular reluctance on the part of enterprise IT to adopt public cloud technology. The reason for that is simple: turkeys do not vote for Christmas.
IT departments currently control IT spending. Cloud is really a technical vehicle facilitating IT outsourcing; and the CIO has an empire to protect. Some CIOs may throw up all sorts of objections to an external cloud, but each of these objections to public cloud can be dispelled. We have set out five common objectives below.
Objection 1 – Public cloud has inadequate SLAs
There are some high volume public cloud services that have inadequate service levels for enterprise applications. But that does not mean that no service provider can ever provide an adequate SLA. Indeed, this is a way in which many service providers differentiate from ‘pile ‘em-high, sell ‘em cheap’ operators.
Furthermore, what SLA does the enterprise currently get from its IT department? What is the net effect on the business of any breach? Does the CIO cut a personal cheque to compensate the enterprise for its loss?
In practice, SLAs are as much about setting the terms of and expectations from the relationship between the enterprise and its service provider; as they are about providing a mechanism of obtaining financial compensation in the event of inadequate service. Service providers seeking to provide cloud solutions to critical functions need to be prepared to offer meaningful SLAs; not only in terms of financial compensation, but also in terms of setting expectations for the relationship. The SLA, for instance, should outline how service reviews will be performed and faults handled. This is a key area of differentiation for those service providers who cannot compete with some of the larger public clouds on scale alone.
Enterprise IT Adoption Cycle
Simon Wardley, a researcher at the Leading Edge Forum, created a version of this graph to illustrate the point.5
5. http://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/07/adoption-cycles.html
Adoption
Time
Ignore Ignore Ignore “No” I said “Oh No” “No” dammit Rest of World Enterprise IT “Panic!” “No”
Objection 2 – Public cloud has
inadequate security
Most security problems are not down to technical failings, but are instead due to poor organisational practice. For example, compare the number of security breaches originating in software bugs to those originating from configuration errors. Whilst cloud does present security challenges, many of these are common to private clouds. Service providers have in-house cloud-focused security expertise, whereas enterprises in general do not. It should be noted that some models of hybrid cloud (for instance cloud bursting) in many ways provide the worst of both worlds here as it throws up the security problems of both public and private cloud.
Objection 3 – For regulatory reasons we cannot
use public cloud
Regulatory restrictions do not in general prohibit use of service provider clouds. Rather, they restrict or mandate specific behaviour, and these restrictions are not in general technology dependent. For instance:
1. Regulations might mandate that data remains in a particular jurisdiction; this is an identical concern to that arising when using a third party datacentre, and negotiable by contract with the service provider. The concern here is thus no different in principle to that of using a third party datacentre.
2. Regulations might mandate that data from one part of the business cannot be stored or processed in the same place as data from another. This might happen, for instance in a financial environment. In such a case the same issue would arise with private cloud. As we set out above, the form of hybrid cloud where certain resources can be dedicated to particular functions is useful in combating this objection.
In such cases it is necessary for service providers to get a deep understanding of what the regulatory restrictions actually are, rather than accept the statement that regulation bans them at face value.
Objection 4 – Applications need to run in-house
for technical reasons
Technical reasons not to use external clouds tend to fall into two categories.
1. The first category is concerned with migration costs. Migration costs do indeed exist, particularly with legacy applications. However if a private cloud truly is a cloud, migration costs will be much the same.
To the extent this objection is valid, it is thus a reason not to use cloud technology at all, or to delay it until the next technology refresh.
Service providers can address this objection by providing a combination of cloud and non-cloud services, or simply agreeing that some legacy IT is unlikely to be outsourced until the next technology refresh.
2. The second category concerns technical properties of public cloud that make its use inappropriate. For instance, latency sensitive applications such as high frequency trading, are never likely to be placed on a public cloud. However, such applications are often inherently unsuitable for any form of cloud technology; in this instance the extra few microseconds added by virtualisation are a reason not to use any form of cloud technology, whether public, private, or hybrid.
Objection 5 – Public cloud is just hype
Some service providers and the technical press have exacerbated the problem here. By presenting homogenous high-volume public cloud as a solution applicable to every problem, rather than presenting a more nuanced argument, they have in some cases alienated CIOs, or at least provided them with a valid line of objection. The CIO that states “we can’t put our whole IT function on Amazon Web Services” clearly has a fair point. But just as public cloud is not a cure-all, neither is a private cloud solution. And sticking one’s head in the sand is not either.
Analysis
Many objections to utilising public cloud technology are at best overplayed and at worst spurious. These represent examples of the principal/agent problem, where the buyer (or his reports) may have a personal incentive at odds with that of the enterprise as a whole. The rational service provider will thus seek to ensure its arguments are made to the widest possible audience within the organisation; the CEO or CFO may be a more receptive audience than the CTO. This underlines the importance of building a deep relationship with the customer and gaining a comprehensive understanding of their business, rather than focusing on cost per CPU cycle.
SUMMARY
Disruptive technologies frequently produce the same reaction, but a particularly good
analogy is the battle between Edison and Westinghouse over whether direct current (DC)
or alternating current (AC) should prevail as the means of supply.
Edison, the incumbent, favoured DC, and held patents on many DC appliances. But Westinghouse’s AC benefited from the considerable economic benefits of central generation (compare these to the economic benefits of centralising compute resources at the service provider). Edison’s DC, unable to use transformers, needed local or distributed generation. But rather than bow to the technical superiority of AC, Edison and his supporters attempted to stoke fears over safety, reliability, and compatibility, and lobbied politicians to mandate use of direct current. This culminated in Edison’s secret funding of Harold Brown to promote his electric chair and the idea that AC was more dangerous than DC, even suggesting it be called the ‘Westinghouse Chair’. But in the face of ever growing use of electricity, and the consummate economic advantage of AC, Westinghouse won out.
And so it will be for cloud computing: it’s not the technology that matters per se, it’s the consequent effect on economics. Private cloud is in essence an attempt to use cloud’s technology without gaining any of the efficiencies. It is for service providers to educate their customers and prospects, and the audience will often be financial or strategic as opposed to technical. Whilst turkeys do not vote for Christmas, Christmas comes with great predictability each year – a fact some CIOs appear to have missed.
WHAT MAKES A GREAT CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER
This paper has detailed the main drivers for adopting a public cloud including the factors
that make it more attractive for the end user to buy, as well as those that make it more
economical for service providers to use cloud technology. When it comes to providing public
cloud services to enterprises, IT resellers and services companies have a choice; either
develop their own infrastructure or partner with an established provider and deliver cloud
services under their own (or the established provider’s) brand.
If they choose to develop their own service, resellers face a host of technical, organisational and financial challenges. However, by partnering with an established provider such as ALVEA Services and offering a cloud infrastructure based on best of breed cloud orchestration software, they can be assured of delivering a flexible, robust and cost-effective solution for their clients. ALVEA Services have been created exclusively for channel partners. They allow resellers to offer enterprise-class cloud services to their clients without the need to invest time or finances in developing or supporting a complex virtual infrastructure themselves. ALVEA Services enables the channel to offer the new products and services that their existing and prospective customers want, while building a recurring revenue base, with the option to white label.
The benefits of partnering with ALVEA Services include:
• The ability to sell enterprise-class cloud services to customers and generate monthly fees which grow as customers’ demands increase
• The knowledge that ALVEA’s datacentre allows total control over the service delivered to resellers as well as their customers, along with a 100% SLA
• Access to a data seeding service to quickly and securely deploy large quantities of data into the cloud service
• Confidence that the100% channel service means customers cannot buy ALVEA direct, giving resellers total control of their value-add and margin
• Just-in-time delivery of virtual servers removes the need to hold physical stock for deployment, maintenance or replacement. Servers are deployed instantly when resellers or their customer need them, so they never need to be purchased in advance
• A reseller portal that allows new accounts to be provisioned quickly and tailored to each customer’s needs
• Simple online provisioning of all services – no need to email requests or find out progress via the phone, the whole process can be executed online
• Customers can manage their services online, cutting the amount of direct support resellers need to provide
• Private labeling of ALVEA services with no set-up fees that allows resellers to deliver cloud services under their own brand
• Sticky client relationships for resellers; as hosted services increase client retention because they are critical to business, they create recurring revenue and offer the channel opportunities for consulting fees With ALVEA Services, the virtual infrastructure is managed, maintained and supported, allowing resellers to concentrate on their clients and core business. ALVEA Services is fully certified against the Cloud Industry Forum’s (CIF) Code of Practice. The certification demonstrates the company’s commitment to best practice in the transparency, accountability and capability of its cloud services and provides channel partners and their customers with the confidence that ALVEA Services is a trusted and fully accredited Cloud Service Provider.
ABOUT US
This white paper is brought to you by ALVEA Services and Flexiant. ALVEA Services
selected Flexiant’s cloud orchestration software for its ALVEA Infrastructure
Service. Flexiant provides ALVEA Infrastructure with an on-demand, fully
automated cloud services provisioning solution which includes comprehensive
billing, white-labelling and a single pane of glass infrastructure control.
ALVEA Services
ALVEA Services offers a suite of cloud and managed solutions across security, infrastructure and resilience. Available exclusively via the channel and delivered through one easy-to-use platform, the ALVEA range offers its partners a one-stop shop for a multitude of services. ALVEA Security, ALVEA Infrastructure and ALVEA Resilience & Continuity currently offer eight distinct services across the portfolio: Managed Network Security, Cloud Based Infrastructure, Managed Content & Application Delivery, Cloud Attached Storage, Satellite Broadband, DNS, Authentication & Anti-Virus. The ALVEA brand is an independent services offering for the channel backed,managed, and supported by technical expertise and infrastructure from COMPUTERLINKS. The suite will continue to be developed by COMPUTERLINKS to enable its partners to provide expertly delivered services to their customers.
www.alvea-services.com
ALVEA Infrastructure
ALVEA Infrastructure offers virtualised on-demand servers, designed to behave just like physical servers. Via the easy-to-use web control panel, enterprise class cloud infrastructure can be deployed in minutes - including the ability to provision cloud system, servers, and networks and then to only pay for what is used, whilst at the same
time being assured that data is secure and always accessible. Designed to bring the full benefits of secure IT on demand to organisations of any size, ALVEA’s cloud architecture gives access to IT infrastructure resource when it’s needed, without all the expense and fuss associated with traditional solutions. Once finished, it’s simply turned off until the next time it’s needed.
Flexiant
Flexiant is a leading international provider of cloud orchestration software for on-demand, fully automated provisioning of cloud services. Headquartered in Europe, Flexiant’s software gives cloud service providers’ business agility, freedom and flexibility to scale, deploy and
configure cloud services, simply and cost-effectively. Vendor agnostic and supporting multiple hypervisors, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is a software suite that is service provider ready, enabling cloud service provisioning through to granular metering, billing and reseller
management. Used by over one hundred organisations worldwide, from small hosters to large Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Enterprises, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is simple to understand, simple to deploy and simple to use. Flexiant customers include Cartika, FP7 Consortium, IS Group, ITEX, and NetGroup.
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