So you’ve decided to jump into the cloud. Congratulations. The decision will save you time, money and headaches over time as you realize the true ROI of hosting the business tools that are traditionally housed on a server. RackSpace, one of the most recognizable names in the cloud industry, recently struck a deal to become a private company. Becoming a private company allows them to reorganize the company, its strategy and its market offering. This comes after steadily declining growth for the past few years during a period of direct competition with some of the biggest players in the space.
So what happened to RackSpace? The same question will be asked of the local hosting options in your market in the near future, if it hasn’t been asked already. In the recent past, local companies rented space or built their own data centers to service their clients’ needs in application hosting and backup & disaster recovery solutions. This model was effective and profitable for service providers as they had little to no competition in the space. Now, the data center market has become extremely crowded with some powerful competition.
Microsoft’s Azure, Google and Amazon Web Services have all been battling to grab your data and store it in one of their massive data centers. They have the advantage of hyper-scale capability, meaning these companies can build, replace and increase their capacity at a moment’s notice, utilizing economies of scale to make it more cost effective than the local competition.
The resulting answer to that question is this: the sizable investment made by the local provider pales in comparison to the titans of the tech world that have entered the market with billions of dollars in research and development funding, flooding out the smaller, localized data centers. While they still exist in varying capacities today, these data centers cannot continue to exist as they operate today. Eventually, the companies using these outdated solutions will realize that there are more effective solutions at a lower cost in the market.
With a multitude of options for cloud solutions, which one makes sense for you? While it is hard to go wrong siding with one of these industry powerhouses, Applied Tech has put its investment into Microsoft’s cloud solution, Azure. The reason we decided to back Azure is that Microsoft has always been the leader in business application development and support, meaning Azure can seamlessly take your applications to the cloud in the same way Office 365 moved email off premise. Azure also fully supports open source technologies that your business may be running. In fact, 1 in 4 Azure servers spun up in Microsoft’s data centers is running Linux. Microsoft recognizes the need to be accommodating to open source technologies and welcomes Linux, Java and others to run within Azure.
Azure’s flexible and affordable platform makes sense for many companies. As it continues to improve, it may also make sense for yours. Contact Applied Tech to discuss the process of fork-lifting on premise applications to the cloud!
