Is there a risk for businesses and resellers in terms of
cloud outages and business downtime? What sort of
backup solutions exist?
All cloud solutions differ with regards to uptime SLAs
(Service Level Agreements). Microsoft for example offers a
financially-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee for their Office
365 product. What this does not take into account is any
potential problems from the connectivity on the user’s side.
Of course, it is possible to cater for this by having redundant
connectivity to the business. However, like everything, the
best solutions come with a hefty price tag.
Companies used to worry about having telephone or
electricity outages, and found ways to mitigate this risk with
generators and cellular connections. Cloud is no different,
and the number of solutions to reduce the risk are great,
ranging from a myriad of local back-up providers to the
geographic redundancy of multiple datacentres.
What do you see being the main capabilities which
Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers
want from Cloud Services Providers?
Firstly from a reseller model, they want margin. They
need to be able to sustain their businesses by selling the
vendor’s product. Next is the ease with which they can do
business with these vendors. VARs and MSPs need to be
able to focus on their customers and their service levels
and should not have to spend large amounts of valuable
time on difficult processes in order to earn their revenue.
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This is why Cloud Service Brokerages are going to be such
an important link in the value chain. They will remove the
complexity of doing business for the VAR while offering a
host of cloud solutions from different vendors available in
one place for the resellers and their customers.
Lastly, VARs and MSPs want to be able to add value to the
Cloud Service Providers’ solutions. This can range from
customisations and integrations, to designing new cloud offerings and hosting them in private, public or a hybrid cloud
for their customers.
Finally, just how big do you see cloud computing’s
impact becoming? Will it ultimately render traditional IT
services completely redundant?
I believe that cloud computing will be the predominant IT
methodology in the next three to five years. Because of
this, the term cloud computing will probably disappear from
daily IT discussions. Cloud architecture will just be the way
we consume IT services, and companies will no longer
have these huge concerns as to where the programme or
information sits. As cloud computing moves from mystery to mainstream, Cloud will just become the pervasive
computing mode like wireless has become the pervasive
connectivity mode. This is an exciting time and resellers
who embrace this change will be able to capitalise on this
technology wave.