CIO opinion
CIO OPINION
However, to draw on a couple of examples,
we have some customers’ whose business is
doing so phenomenally well that they need
support in ensuring their IT infrastructure
is able to support it. For example, Boozt is
one of the fastest growing online fashion
and beauty companies, which found the
demands on its systems were increasing in
line with its popularity – particularly around
peak periods. To support the company’s small
team in managing the growth in and influxes
in traffic, we worked with Boozt to migrate
to Google Cloud Platform. This helped it
manage a 40% hike in customer visits over
this particular period – equating to around
50,000 new customers – without a minute of
downtime or any performance issues.
Whereas for Trading Point, a large and
well-established international investment
online brokerage firm, the internal IT team
needed to focus on driving value back to
the business’ core competencies, so the
company started looking for a strategic
partner to take on the management of
hardware infrastructure and support the
firm in the maintenance of its systems.
High reliability and low latency are key
to ensuring that Trading Point is able to
continuously deliver its superior service to its
customers. So, for Rackspace, the challenge
lay in ensuring that the IT infrastructure was
scalable, optimised and secure.
What trends are impacting CIOs
the most and how is Rackspace
supporting customers?
One of the biggest challenges CIOs face is
ensuring they’re able to deliver value from
their cloud and Digital Transformation
projects at cost. A recent global survey
of business and IT leaders found that
several years into their migration, 40% of
businesses said their cloud migration costs
were still higher than expected.
Ensuring that our customers are able to use
their budget to best accelerate the value of
the cloud in their organisation is key. One
way we’re assisting them with this is through
the launch of our new subscription cloud
model, Service Blocks.
This works similarly to bolt-on data plans,
where you can increase your service based
on your immediate needs. For your mobile,
this might be more data to entertain your
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INTELLIGENTCIO
kids on a long card journey, in the cloud this
could be providing additional expertise to
support you in a specific project – whether
that’s a ‘Cost Governance as a Service’ or
‘Solution Architect as-a-Service’ to build
complex cloud architectures.
Lowering the barrier to consume these new
services will enable our customers accelerate
their value to the cloud and ensure that they
have the right support when embarking
on more complex tasks. Six week waits for
statements of work are now dead. We know
our customers crave flexibility, the ability
to scale up and down and customisable
offerings – whether that’s in their
operations, resource requirements or service
engagements – and that its ultimately
critical for their success in the cloud. n
“
ENSURING THAT
OUR CUSTOMERS
ARE ABLE TO USE
THEIR BUDGET TO
BEST ACCELERATE
THE VALUE OF THE
CLOUD IN THEIR
ORGANISATION
IS KEY.
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