Cloud computing has completely changed the way companies use technology to service customers, partners, and suppliers. Larger businesses, such as Google and Amazon, already utilise the Cloud for majority of their IT resources, eliminating many of the complex constraints of the traditional computing environment, including space, time, power, and cost.
Ultimate IT’s secure data-centre facilities provide organisations with top-level security, performance, bandwidth and assured uptime backed by service level guarantees.
We offer a range of managed dedicated servers, dedicated virtual services and hosted cloud services, such as hosted email servers, web hosting, SPAM prevention, managed firewalls and hosted applications.
In the simplest of terms, The “Cloud” is the delivery of software, infrastructure, databases, networking, storage and more, completely over the Internet. It can be delivered either as separate components or a complete platform, based on the requirement.
Cloud computing has four essential benefits:
Scalability
Reliability
Maintenance Free
Pay As You Go
Cloud computing comes in three forms: public clouds, private clouds, and hybrids clouds. Here at Ultimate IT, we can assist in determining which cloud type suits your business best by comparing your requirements to the various available levels of security and management.
A private cloud maintains services and infrastructure on a private network; it is essentially an extension of an enterprise’s traditional datacentre optimized to provide greater storage capacity and processor power for a variety of functions, offering the greatest level of security and control available.
However, this requires the purchase and maintenance of all software and infrastructure, which in many cases reduces the anticipated cost savings.
To complicate things, the lines between private and public clouds are blurring. For example, some public cloud companies are now offering private versions of their public clouds. Some companies that only offered private cloud technologies are now offering public versions of those same capabilities.
A private cloud is considered feasible where: –
- Your data and your applications is your business; control and security are paramount.
- Your business is part of an industry that must conform to strict security and data privacy issues (PCI, SOX, HIPA, etc.).
- Your company is large enough to run and maintain a next generation cloud data centre efficiently and effectively on its own.
A public cloud typically provides services and infrastructure that is not owned by the business itself (such as application, storage capacity and processor power) and delivers them over the Internet via a third party provider. They offer the greatest level of efficiency in shared resources; however, they’re also more vulnerable than private clouds.
A public cloud is considered feasible where: –
- Your standardized workload for applications is used by many people (such as e-mail)
- You only test and develop application code.
- Your company run SaaS (Software as a Service) applications from a vendor who already has a well-implemented security strategy.
- Your workforce requires scalable capacity (the ability to add or remove computer capacity during peak times).
- You’re only engaged in collaboration projects.
- You’re performing an ad-hoc software development project using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering cloud.
Public cloud typically raises many concerns about security and reliability. When considering this technology, invest the time in ensuring that security and governance issues are well planned, or the short-term cost savings could turn into a longer-term nightmare.
A hybrid cloud typically includes a variety of public and private options with multiple providers. By spreading things out over a hybrid cloud, you keep each aspect at your business in the most efficient environment possible.
The downside is that you must manage multiple platforms of varying security and, most importantly, ensure that all aspects of your business can communicate effectively.
A couple of scenarios where a hybrid environment may be best suited:
- Your company wants to use a SaaS application but is concerned about security. Your SaaS vendor can create a private cloud just for your company inside their firewall. They provide you with a virtual private network (VPN) for additional security.
- Your company offers services that are tailored for different vertical markets. You can use a public cloud to interact with the clients but keep their data secured within a private cloud.
The management requirements of cloud computing become much more complex when you need to manage private, public, and traditional data centres all together.
Cloud Solutions
Overview
Hosted environments provide complete turn-key solutions for organisations; an efficient green and elastic approach allows usage needs to fluctuate as business requirements change from month to month. It also allows smaller organisations access to more reliable solutions that would be difficult for them to justify on a capital expenditure basis.
Features & Benefits
- Managed Dedicated Servers & Dedicated Virtual Servers
- Managed Storage Area Network
- Redundant High Availability and Failover Options
- Redundant Power grid and guaranteed uptime
- Fully secure data centre facilities includes video surveillance and Mantraps, 24/7 security guards, cameras and more
- Ideal for remote users and dispersed workforces
Hosted Software Applications
ULTIMATE IT Services can host line of business applications or on-demand software as a service (SaaS); this is suitable for many industries including point of sale, CRM, document management, legal and real estate. Hosting custom applications in the cloud allows simple deployment, maintenance, management and upgrades for these applications as required.
Hosted Email/Exchange Hosting
Premium hosting of email servers including Microsoft Exchange and full Microsoft Outlook integration and connectivity with your organisation’s PDAs and mobile devices.
This provides cost effective hosting which can provide lower total cost of ownership with managed hardware, storage, backups and connectivity for critical email information.
This model allows organisations to choose different mailbox sizes and avoids complexities of mail server management, updates and upgrades and also includes inbuilt SPAM filtering solutions.
SPAM prevention
By hosting SPAM prevention in the cloud, clients receive email from SPAM and viruses. It further removes the complex management overheads and false positive risks associated with typical in-house SPAM solutions as it provides better utilisation of Internet services; email servers are not bogged down with unnecessary traffic associated with processing SPAM and responding to illegitimate messages. Find out how ULTIMATE SmartMail services can improve employee productivity (Click link to the SPAM section – NSS 7).
Web Hosting
Web Hosting services allows organisations to have their own company website accessible via the World Wide Web. ULTIMATE IT Webhosting services provide flexible and cost effective options for organisations of all sizes to host their company website in secure data centre facilities without the associated costs.
Security Solutions
Many companies are forced to compromise on IT security due to the high costs associated in implementing and maintaining these systems. ULTIMATE IT Services have many security services hosted in the cloud to complement existing company infrastructure. Provide turn-key open point security solutions such as strong authentication, auditing, scanning and logging without the internal expertise, resources, infrastructure and expense required to operate and maintain these solutions.
Email Archiving
Email archiving can prove a useful tracking and auditing tool for many organisations for many different reasons. It essentially provides a systematic approach to saving and protecting the data contained in email messages so it can be accessed quickly at a later date.
In the past, companies often relied on end-users to maintain their own individual e-mail archives. While IT departments would back up e-mail, it was not held in a manner that made messages searchable. If a specific e-mail needed to be traced, it often took weeks to find it. With today’s compliance legislation and legal discovery rules, it has become necessary for many companies to manage e-mail archiving in bulk so specific messages can be located in minutes, not weeks.
Policy-based e-mail archiving services are available to allow management of large e-mail archives, as well as to free up space on production servers and speed up backup times. Services typically include indexing and search capabilities, access logs to provide a “virtual paper trail” in the event an e-mail is subpoenaed, and a lifecycle management component, which acts as kind of a traffic cop for all e-mail coming in to the company.
Life-cycle management uses rules that classify which e-mail messages need to be archived, migrate the messages to the most economical and efficient storage media, and automatically delete messages when they are no longer needed.