Embracing Change - September

Last month’s topic of Virtual Private Networks leads me on nicely to what I want to talk to resellers about in this month’s Embracing Change column.

For customers who you have sold VPNs to in the past, as a secure and cost-effective method of transferring data between users in one or more locations, hosted resources should come as a natural upsell opportunity.

In a VPN deployment, whilst many links may exist into the ISP network, you always face the challenge of saturating or finding yourself having to overcommit with key sites where applications or other services are hosted. The beauty hosted resources is that those applications are sat within the very network the VPN end points are connected to, delivering wire speed access without saturation.

A data centre such as Daisy Wholesale’s, for example, benefits from advanced features, including 24/7 manned security, internal and external CCTV, ID verification process, secure environments, fire suppression, cooling, 24x7  remote hands - all the things you may not see at a customer’s office.

You are more likely to get a customer to adopt hosted resources or cloud applications if you can present a data centre with these facilities and an array of added benefits.

These are some of the reasons why the industry is currently seeing an up-rise in the number of people adopting hosted applications and making an investment in data centre environments. Disaster recovery is big business. There has never been a better time to embrace the change.

However, as I have previously stressed, what we’re never suggesting to our customers is to try and encourage all your customers to transfer all their business to the cloud; it is a very generic term and it encompasses many things and is widely open to interpretation.

A big bang is not the answer; but moving servers out of an office location into a secure data centre environment is an important step forward in adopting cloud services. Be sure to find a data centre that will conform to high standards and give the customer the confidence to adopt the change. The right data centre will boast high quality facilities in terms of co-location space, carrier connectivity, power, fire detection, cooling, and not just security.