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Sprint making business agility real with reliable cloud
computing solutions
Partnership with CSC enables enterprise-class cloud services
SUMMARY
Ovum view
Customers of all sizes and in ever-increasing numbers are investigating how cloud computing can become a permanent and effective part of their corporate IT environments. In turn, IT providers are stepping up to deliver a wide spectrum of cloud services. Sprint, in partnership with CSC, provides enterprise-class IaaS offerings that combine Sprint’s knowledge and expertise in the network with CSC’s decades-long experience in outsourcing. With this combination, Sprint is able to deliver high levels of flexibility, automation, management and security through IaaS for its customers, enabling them to use IT to drive cost benefits and business agility.
Key messages
Why customers are turning to cloud, and the benefits cloud can deliver
What customers want from a cloud services provider
The value of Sprint’s cloud offering for cloud customers
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WHY CUSTOMERS ARE TURNING TO CLOUD AND THE BENFITS CLOUD CAN DELIVER
Cloud is becoming key element of successful IT
Whether they like it or not, customers must consider cloud as part of the future state of their IT environments. For many customers, the drumbeat around cloud’s promised benefits is simply too loud to ignore.
Cloud is real, and all customers are considering cloud as part of their short- and long-term IT strategies in order to tap into a multitude of potential benefits. Customers in the short-term can take advantage of cloud strictly as a cost-saving and cost control measure, as cloud services can bring predictable IT operating costs, decreased capital spending, and increased spending flexibility to an organization. However, cloud is not just about cost. Many customers view cloud as an important step in a longer-term transformation, bringing with it new business models, new levels of business agility, and access to new technology trends that will ultimately make their businesses more nimble, efficient and successful. For example, some customers may want to leverage cloud to increase customer satisfaction, or enter new regions or vertical industries, or engage new types of partners. Others want to take the cost savings from a cloud deployment and invest those funds in new initiatives around mobility or business intelligence, making their organizations more competitive. Overall, our research shows that customers see cloud as an enabler to real and substantial business benefits, even if customers initially approach cloud as a way solely to lower IT costs.
With these trends as a backdrop, the implementation of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is viewed by many customers as a critical first step toward broader cloud adoption. Some customers are taking a company-wide, transformational approach with cloud, looking to infuse cloud into every part of their business. However, the vast majority is employing an evolutionary approach, preferring to embark on a step-by-step journey to cloud starting with IaaS, and then considering other types of cloud services for additional transformation.
IaaS generally covers compute and/or storage resources combined with network resources and associated services via the cloud, delivered from a virtualized environment in a variety of models including:
Public: Services available to almost anyone or any organization that taps into a publically available, shared virtualized cloud environment from third-party providers.
Private: A virtualized cloud environment dedicated to a single organization, deployed either at a customer’s site or off-site from a third-party provider.
Virtual private: A private cloud deployed within a virtualized public cloud model, which can be connected to a customer’s IT infrastructure through secure network connections.
Hybrid: A combination of several cloud services, deployed either on- or off-site.
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Each model requires certain levels of security, automation and management in order to achieve the desired benefits – whether those benefits are related to cutting costs, improving the business, or both. In many cases, the success of IaaS deployments will determine whether a customer stops, slows or accelerates its cloud journey. What’s more, customers' experiences of working with providers to deploy IaaS services will determine their trust and comfort levels for expanding into other types of cloud services – so it’s important that customers get IaaS right the first time.
Cloud services usage and investment
Customers, no matter what their size or vertical industry, are fairly united when it comes to their reasons for pursuing cloud services and IaaS. In our Ovum Business Trends Cloud Services survey, we asked 200 respondents – all IT decision-makers and or line-of-business leaders with oversight of IT investments -- to rate the factors that influence their decision to invest in cloud services. As reflected in Figure 1, cutting IT or business related costs and improving business agility were rated as the most important factors. Conversely, other results showed that data security and compliance issues – not issues related to cost -- were the biggest challenge or impediments to cloud investments among our respondent base. Overall, the results track to what we’ve observed in the market: cost take-out remains a primary motivator for cloud and will force many customers to consider it, but only if they’re convinced that cloud services can be delivered securely, and within all established compliance and regulatory requirements.
Figure 1: Factors influencing cloud services investment
Source: OVUM
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Entry into new vertical industries Layoffs or staff reduction Entry into new geographies Merger or acquistion activities Entry into new markets or lines of business Improve time to market Develop innovative new business activities Data center or IT consolidation Improvement of business processes Application modernization Improve business agility Cutting overall business costs Cutting IT costs
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Discussions around whether to invest in cloud go hand-in-hand with decisions on how cloud will be utilized. With respect to IaaS, according to our survey results (which included respondents in the US, United Kingdom, Germany and France), disaster recovery, storage backup, and the
development of custom in-house applications outpaced other potential IaaS deployments, especially among US-based respondents. Providers such as Sprint often highlight cost-effective disaster recovery and backup as two highly effective IaaS deployments, which could help explain why these two areas scored so well in our survey. In addition, customers need disaster recovery and backup, as horizontal IT functions, to be as reliable and cost-effective as possible, thereby allowing any IT savings to be re-invested in other core areas.
WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT FROM A CLOUD PROVIDER
Customers need a vendor they can trust
The cloud services provider market is a crowded and competitive space – leaving some customers confused as to which provider they should engage with. However, as customers delve into the provider landscape, they are very clear on what characteristics and behaviors they want in their cloud services vendor.
As shown in Figure 2, our survey respondents cited trust in provider, security expertise, management capabilities, and ongoing support as critical factors in selecting a cloud services provider. It’s not surprising that customers rated trust as their most important factor; they will naturally turn to their incumbent providers, vendors with whom they’ve worked previously, or well- known and established vendors as they explore cloud services. However, as shown by our survey results, this is only true if those if those providers have demonstrated an ability to secure, manage and deliver services effectively and reliably.
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Figure 2: Factors influencing cloud services selection
Source: OVUM
Other results in our survey show that customers need help identifying what workloads/functions can be moved to a cloud model, including IaaS. Cloud services providers need to demonstrate that they can shepherd customers through their cloud services “journey” at every turn – especially if those customers are starting with short-term cloud investments with an eye toward using cloud as a long-term transformational enabler.
With customers looking to consolidate the number of strategic IT suppliers and outsourcers they deal with, vendors also will need to continue to prove they can be trusted to implement and run cloud services securely and effectively. This is where the strengths of an incumbent or a well- established provider can come into play. Customers know first-hand, or can be reasonably confident, that a well-known provider has a proven track record of providing traditional IT services that address a wide spectrum of customer requirements – and the provider should be able to do the same with cloud services.
THE VALUE OF SPRINT’S IAAS OFFERING FOR CUSTOMERS
Sprint’s expertise with its MPLS
Sprint is on a steady march toward offering a wide variety of cloud computing services, which isn’t surprising given today’s market trends, and Sprint’s experience as a solutions integrator serving customers’ network, mobility and IT requirements. For the past several years, we’ve observed a range of providers – IT services firms, outsourcers, software vendors, and telecom/network
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Location of data centers Knowledge of your specific geography Depth and breadth of portfolio Price flexibility Management and control of offering Knowledge or your specific vertical industry Application expertise Clear and robust SLAs Flexibility to adjust services as needed Support/problem resolution procedures Data/information management expertise Security expertise Trust in the provider
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providers – invest in their cloud services portfolios and capabilities, and increase their cloud outreach to customers in different vertical industries. Each provider group attempts to differentiate their offerings from one another.
Telecom providers, including Sprint, view themselves as having a distinct advantage over others, as their experience with delivering secure network services essentially gives them “ownership” of the cloud. Unlike other IT services vendors that must rely on network provider partnerships for routing and connectivity to the cloud (into either private or public cloud data center resources), providers such as Sprint can enable direct access to the cloud itself.
Sprint, in particular, sees its evolution into cloud services as a natural extension of its high- performance, and highly reliable, MPLS network. Some customers, in exploring an initial adoption of cloud services, focus exclusively on their organizations’ application portfolios, and what
workloads can be readily migrated to the cloud (in either a private, virtual private, public or hybrid delivery model). While workload considerations are obviously very important, focusing too much on applications, without considering the impact on an organization’s network resources, can derail any cloud services project.
Network reliability and flexibility are critical factors in any cloud services discussion, which is why Sprint sees its network, and its experience in managing and securing that network, as such a strategic differentiator compared to other cloud providers. The vendor describes the network as already being “cloud aware,” with expedited access provisioning and traffic prioritization
capabilities, backed up with comprehensive SLAs that are well-known to Sprint’s client base. Using the “cloud aware” network as a base, Sprint can engage customers in broader cloud discussions that encompass IT infrastructure needs, application workloads, and potential IT and business benefits of a cloud project. Throughout these discussions, Sprint can assure customers that its network can provide whatever levels of performance and reliability are required.
Sprint’s partnership with CSC for IaaS offerings
In addition to Sprint’s network expertise, we see Sprint exhibiting many of the characteristics that our survey respondents said they look for in a cloud vendor, as noted above: a trusted provider, with extensive security and management capabilities, and strong support procedures and SLAs.
Sprint’s solution design approach also enables them to work with customers to determine the best cloud use cases for each organization.
These characteristics come into sharper focus when considering its partnership with outsourcing heavyweight CSC to deliver new IaaS offerings to the market. Under the terms of this exclusive partnership, announced in July 2012, Sprint will use its Global MPLS network with all of its embedded features to deliver Sprint CloudCompute, a CSC IaaS solution. These IaaS offerings are aimed at US-headquartered customers, both current and prospective Sprint clients.
The combination brings together Sprint’s skills in network security, provisioning and traffic management with CSC’s experience in running and managing data centers, as well as CSC’s
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profile as a trusted outsourcing provider. In previous reports, we’ve commented on CSC’s solid portfolio of cloud services, the result of a multi-year investment and development effort. Sprint will provide their customers with secure, private access to IaaS offerings housed and managed at secure CSC data centers.
Figure 3: Sprint’s IaaS offerings, in partnership with CSC
Source: Sprint
Figure 3 shows Sprint’s IaaS offering, which mirrors how CSC itself takes CloudCompute to market. The offering includes an IaaS layer that provides all of the core underpinnings and essential capabilities needed by customers: virtual machines, storage, CPUs, memory, etc.
CloudCompute also includes management and service catalogue capabilities to size and deploy cloud environments. The two off-premise options, public and virtual private cloud, are delivered from CSC's SSAE 16 certified Type III data centers with standard and optional security services, which are further enhanced by the security in Sprint’s MPLS network. Sprint’s offering comes with a choice of three support tiers (Silver through Platinum) aligned to workload-driven service levels ranging from 99.5% to 99.95% availability guarantees that include both the IaaS environment and Sprint network components.
In addition, Sprint can provide a “one-stop shop” that offers efficiencies for customers: a single combined contract for network and IaaS services, a single invoice, and a single point of contact for service assurance. This is an important point for customers, especially in terms of Sprint building trust among current and new cloud customers, and showing that it can effectively deliver and support its cloud offerings. There will be one global account team working with and supporting
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Sprint’s cloud customers, monitoring and maintaining high levels of availability for both its network and cloud services, and addressing any issues or problems that may arise.
With its CSC partnership and the addition of IaaS in multiple deployment options, Sprint adds to its growing stable of cloud services which currently includes cloud-based unified communications and hosted email, with more expansive SaaS offerings on the horizon. Sprint also intends to work closely with CSC, as it engages with IaaS customers, to improve and innovate on its IaaS offerings in order to meet evolving customer needs.
CONCLUSIONS
Reaching IT and business benefits with cloud
Business needs, economic concerns, and customer demands are driving many organizations, of all sizes, to pursue IT strategies that include near and long-term plans for cloud services. The implementation of IaaS is viewed by many customers as a critical first step toward broader cloud adoption. Many customers will implement cloud at first as a tactical point solution with the goal of achieving immediate cost savings. But customers can attain better value for both IT and business if they realize the longer-term strategic value that cloud services can deliver -- if done right at the outset.
This is why it’s important for customers to work with a provider that can demonstrate how to use cloud tactically and strategically, taking into account what infrastructure, application and critical network resources will be needed for successful cloud projects like IaaS. Customers also want to work with cloud providers that can bring together all of these assets and deliver cloud services securely and reliably, as in many cases customers' experiences with deploying IaaS will determine whether they invest in other types of cloud services.
Customers can engage Sprint for their cloud journey
Sprint’s IaaS offering is coming to market at an opportune time. Customers are searching for the best options for cloud deployments including IaaS, and want to work with proven providers of IT systems that are secure, reliable and well managed. Sprint’s partnership with CSC brings together high-profile skills of two trusted providers for IaaS: one with expertise in secure and reliable network services, management and connectivity (as “the network is the cloud”), the other with proven, industry recognized experience IT outsourcing and managing secure data centers. Sprint’s offering gives customers another strong and viable option as they move ahead with their cloud decisions.
What’s more, Sprint can engage with customers in discussions about their short- and longer-term journeys toward broader cloud deployments – especially as Sprint builds upon both its CSC relationship and its IaaS offering to include additional cloud services. The ability to lead customers
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along on this journey is especially important as cloud envelops other emerging trends to the point where any consideration of cloud services will include the evolving connections between cloud, mobility, and data (business intelligence, data management, and analytics). Indeed, many IT services, outsourcing and telecom vendors are already connecting these trends in their
discussions with customers. Sprint’s ability to contribute to such discussions seems like a natural, given its growing cloud portfolio, and its extensive experience in network and mobility services.
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APPENDIX
Author
John Madden, Principal Analyst, IT Services [email protected]
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