Cloud Computing Solutions

If you are thinking of moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud, schedule a consultation with Krantz today. Since there is so much confusion about what is a cloud provider, the very different types of offerings that are available, and what may or may not be right for you, we can help you start with some free education. Our goal is simply to help you differentiate all the "cloud noise" .

Then if you think you'd like to pursue it further, there is some serious due dilligence that needs to take place to evaluate your IT requirements. But if a solution works for you, the benefits are awesome!

Krantz Secure Cloud Integration Services

Our Cloud Services are a natural extension of our Managed Services and Virtualization practices. When a customer moves "to the cloud" all their IT processes are virtualized and we provide the same personalized proactive support services for our Cloud Services customers that that we do for Managed Services clients.

We begin with our Cloud Assessment Service, which is a comprehensive analysis of each business processes to determine if it is suitable for the cloud. Then we'll determine if a Public, Private, Hybrid, or On Premise Cloud Solution is right for you, and develop an implementation plan.

We manage your private or hybrid cloud infrastructure in our data center or your premises, completely customized to meet your business needs. In either instance, we provide the same system monitoring tools, help desk support, 24x7x365 emergency support, network administration, application integration services, etc.
 

Benefits of Moving to the Cloud:

• Eliminates large up front captial expense and reclassify it as a reocurring monthly operating expense.
• Lowered IT costs. Not only do you save money on software licenses, but hardware (servers and workstations) as well as in IT support and upgrades.
• Ability to access your desktop and/or applications from anywhere and any device. If you travel a lot, have remote workers or prefer to use an iPad while traveling and a laptop at your house, cloud computing will give you the ability to work from any of these devices.
• Disaster recovery and backup are automated. Our Tier 3, SAS70 type II is extremely secure and highly redundant to fully protect your systems. To maintain a type 3 certification we must provide 99.982% up-time availability.
• It's faster, cheaper and easier to set up new employees. Plus, if you have a seasonal workforce, or reduce staff, you simply terminate the user accounts when they leave.
• You use it without having to "own" it. More specifically, you don't own the responsibility of having to install, update and maintain the infrastructure.
• It's a "greener" technology that will save on power and your electric bill. For some smaller companies, the power savings will be too small to measure. However, for larger companies with multiple servers who are cooling a hot server room and keep their servers running 24/7/365, the savings are considerable.
   

Risks of Cloud Computing:

• The Internet is going down. While you can mitigate this risk by using a commercial grade Internet connection, maintaining a second backup connection, or using wireless broadband on devices, there is a chance that you'll lose Internet connectivity, making it impossible to work from your office.
• Data security. Many people don't feel comfortable having their data in some offsite location. This is a valid concern and before you choose any cloud provider, you need to find out more information about where they are storing your data, how secure is the site, how it's encrypted, who has access and how you can get it back.
• Certain line-of-business applications won't work in the cloud. For example, an architect's CAD drawing application will perform much better on their high powered workstations. There also is the need to confirm that all your application vendors will support their application when running on a virtualized platform (while this is an ever shrinking list, it should not be overlooked).
• Compliance Issues. There are a number of laws and regulations such as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA that require companies to control and protect their data and certify that they have knowledge and control over who can access the data, who sees it and how and where it is stored. In a public cloud environment, this can be a problem. Many cloud providers won't tell you specifically where your data is stored.