"NetApp Private Storage as a Service helps us meet Germany's strict data security requirements so that we can maintain the trust of our customers," said Holger Kärcher, CEO and founder of Helpium, and a client of service provider DARZ. "We can tell them exactly where their data lives and who is managing it. If anything should happen to one of our cloud providers, we still control our customers' data. I don't have to worry about losing control over my data, and I can scale my infrastructure as needed."

Helpium, Germany's first IT service marketplace, connects consumers and businesses with IT experts for on-demand support. Users can search for an expert and can engage with the expert directly through Helpium's online platform. Protecting its users' data and maintaining the trust of its customers are among the company's top priorities.

The company's runaway growth, however, left it vulnerable to unpredictable workloads and increasing demands on performance, so it needed alternatives to its traditional infrastructure. Because the company transmits and stores highly sensitive user data from its remote desktop sessions, a public cloud solution seemed out of the question.

DARZ, a full-service IT provider based in Germany, is known for its ultrahigh security services and a modular product portfolio. It had an innovative offering to meet Helpium's challenge: NetApp Private Storage (NPS) as a Service. This solution provides access to dedicated, private NetApp storage that is housed in a secure data center. It also enables Helpium to tap into compute resources in the DARZ private cloud or in popular hyperscale clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SoftLayer.

NPS as a Service from DARZ makes it possible for Helpium to leverage the elasticity, cost and performance benefits of public cloud providers without putting its data -- or its business -- at risk. Helpium can combine services from AWS and SoftLayer to optimize cost and performance for individual workloads. Because data lives locally in DARZ's high-security data center, Helpium can switch workloads between cloud providers in seconds without having to migrate data.

Since implementing NPS as a Service, Helpium has gained:

• Complete data sovereignty and control
• The ability to switch between cloud providers in seconds with no data migration
• Flexibility to choose the best cloud for any workload
• Elasticity to scale more than 100 times to meet unpredictable spikes in demand
• The ability to combine colocation, a private cloud, and hyperscale public clouds into one seamless solution