Ownership & Control

Make Sure All Involved Feel The Pain

When Your IT Systems Go Down, Who Gets The Headache

In many Enterprise IT environments, past and present, large IT organizations “Own” and “Control” their systems. The systems are onsite, and the IT staff work there as well. This provides piece-of-mind to management, because when things go wrong, you have the control and ownership needed to get it fixed.

As systems evolve to use Cloud Computing, and other offsite hosting options such as Managed Hosting and Software-as-a-Service, what changes in Ownership and Control are there.

One approach is called Software-as-a-Service or SaaS. This is when you rent an application by-the-seat or by-the-user. Prices average $100/month/user for many packages. Because you rent, you share the underlying systems with many users. SaaS works well with very small organizations of a dozen or so staff. You have no Ownership or Control, you rent, and you're one of thousands using that server. When problems arise, support is hard to come by due to this same lack of investment or commitment. While you may be put out-of-business during an outage, your SaaS provider only risks the dollar amount of your monthly bill. Motivation to solve your problems is lacking and unbalanced.

Cloudy IT's approach gives you Ownership and Control, as we'll show you shortly.

Another approach is called Managed Hosting. This is when you lease (usually 3 years) hardware and infrastructure in a hosting facility. While you Own the lease on the server, you rely on Managed Hosting staff to Control your system operations. They provide only Operating System and Database support. Your internal IT staff works with (or against) them to manage the complete system. When problems arise, although you are important to them because of Ownership and the lease you pay, Control is split between your staff and the Managed Hosting staff. They, by contract, are only responsible for servers that run, rather than solutions that work. A running server with malfunctioning software means, you're out-of-business and there's no motivation is lacking and unbalanced.

At Cloudy IT, we employ Cloud-based Servers from Amazon Web Services. These Cloud Servers are created, managed and destroyed near-instantly at the click of a button. Clones of whole systems are available anytime. So, if hardware is failing, a few clicks later, we can move your whole system to a new piece of hardware, with no additional cost. This means that Cloudy IT can concentrate on the software solution to your problem, because hardware/infrastructure/facility issues are easily handled.

Cloud servers offer Ownership and Control, because you, have an account with the Cloud provider Amazon, that you hold-the-keys, which provides both Ownership and Control. And because whole environments can be cloned, or moved at a click-of-a-mouse, hardware, facility and infrastructure issues simply disappear from the support equation.

At Cloudy IT, our business is based on your continued satisfaction. If you feel the pain of an outage, we'll feel it too. You share your Control with us, and we have access to every component, every piece-of-the-puzzle, and we can quickly solve any problem.