Local IT services company IT Anywhere has selected Tarsus Cloud On Demand as its partner to help it better roll out and deploy end-to-end cloud services and solutions to its customers.
An early adopter of Cloud On Demand’s cloud-based services, IT Anywhere works with customers to provide a holistic IT services offering to its base of small- to medium-sized customers. Many of these services include cloud-based offerings that are hosted in the Cloud On Demand data centre on behalf of the customer.
“Customers who are considering placing their businesses in the cloud want to do so with the least amount of “hassle” possible. We have customers who simply want to rent a server in the cloud, and we have those who want to move their entire IT infrastructure off site into a hosted vDC (virtual data centre). Working with Cloud On Demand has enabled us to package whatever solution our customer is comfortable with and then roll it out with little effort, and zero downtime,” states Shaun Pollak, CEO at IT Anywhere.
Because of the myriad products provided by its partner, the company says that its journey to providing customers with cloud-based services and solutions has been seamless. This coupled with the support and skills of the Cloud On Demand team has been a real business differentiator for IT Anywhere.
Some examples of successful cloud project rollouts according to Pollak include working with a client who needed to quickly replicate its internal servers and place a “copy” of it in the cloud. With the technologies deployed by Cloud On Demand the process was seamless and required little intervention from his own team “because the technology just works”.
The IT Anywhere clients are all at different stages of their cloud adoption, the company more recently completed a full “build” of a system for a multi-branch customer who wanted to replace their entire server, firewall and VPN management infrastructure with a cloud-based solution. While he says there were small teething problems in the beginning, he says that the technical support he got from the Cloud On Demand team was incredible, and the client was able to make the move flawlessly in a very short space of time.
“Our partnership with Cloud On Demand gives us the confidence to sell solutions that our own team isn’t even 100% versed in rolling out, because we now have a partner that is willing to work with us right from scoping out the project through to its deployment. Not to mention the fact that its pre-sales and implementation support, together with the swift turnaround times are top notch. If we want the team to come and present with us – they are there. The company provides a true all-round value-add as a premier cloud infrastructure services partner,” adds Pollak.
The IT Anywhere portfolio has now grown to include a host of cloud-based services where it will either replicate an existing solution for a customer and host it in the cloud or build it from scratch based on the product and solution offering within the Cloud On Demand Datacentre.
“There are however some challenges to the cloud. The primary one at this stage is cost. It can be a lot for a customer to swallow at first but when they factor in all of the long-term benefits, scope in the disaster recovery and business continuity benefits it yields etc., then suddenly it makes sense for them,” states Pollak.
“Looking ahead I believe that as cloud becomes more pervasive and cheaper as a result, the more we will find the trend sway towards cloud-based infrastructure. Coupled with the ever-increasing flexi-hour work lifestyle in business, we will see a growth in demand – particularly in light of what people are still paying to maintain physical infrastructure for staff that are spending more time being mobile.”
The real reasons customers today opt for cloud-based solutions over and above traditional infrastructure is according to Pollak the uptime guarantee it offers (particularly in light of load-shedding), the stability of the infrastructure and the fact that there is no hardware to support. Then of course the business continuity aspect for customers that simply cannot report any downtime. Smaller businesses are also drawn to the rental ‘Opex’ option instead of a large capital investment into physical infrastructure which comes with its own added expenses of for example, a generator, air-conditioning, floor space – all of which add to the total cost of ownership.
“Yes I think the cloud is going to grow and we are pleased to be early adopters in what will eventually become a race to offer premier cloud services. From a partnership point of view I know we made the right call when we partnered with Cloud On Demand. The team is knowledgeable, supportive, well skilled, and exceptionally amenable. We did our due diligence and they proved themselves tops on our scorecard,” ends Pollak.
Today IT Anywhere provides a range of IT services to small to medium businesses, that include managed services, end-to-end IT support, Wi-Fi and eventing connectivity solutions and services, as well as a bespoke electronic document management solution.