As many companies are migrating their Web infrastructure to the cloud, including Microsoft Azure, they are realizing the advantages of managing Web assets on these platforms. But there are also issues that have challenged companies making the transition.
To find out more about both the good and the bad and how companies are minimizing the bad, I reached out to John Trembley, Chief Marketing Officer, Atmosera.
VMblog: Increasingly who
controls where Websites are deployed?
Over the past year we have seen a clear shift with marketing
teams being in the driver's seat. A corporate website, and especially
e-commerce sites, have become the lifeblood of most companies. As a result,
budgets have increased and marketing teams are on the hook to deliver better
performance, speed up the pace of updates, improve reliability, and reduce
overall costs.
VMblog: Why are more
companies turning to public clouds like Azure for their corporate Websites and
e-commerce sites?
Trembley: The need to achieve better performance and reliability has
many looking to the major cloud providers because of their footprint,
reputation, and usage-based pricing. In some cases, marketing teams are seeking
solutions on their own, circumventing their IT departments. There is a strong
desire to make sure websites are deployed on modern infrastructure and no
longer sitting on a server under a desk, in a on premise data center, or a single
colocation facility.
VMblog: What are the key
benefits these companies seek to leverage?
Trembley: Clouds such as Azure offer compelling capabilities for
geo-distribution across the globe, flexible architectures, configurable
Information Security and compliance options, and pay by the hour usage. An
overarching goal is to deliver a consistent performance and ensure rapid page
loads regardless of where the visitor is located. Some customers are even
starting to request guarantees for maximum page load times as part of their
contracts.
VMblog: What are some of
the pitfalls to watch out for?
Trembley: Deploying in a cloud such as Azure is far more complicated
than many realize. The leading cloud providers have done an amazing job
creating feature-rich offerings but that means there are many considerations
and options which have to be thought through. This demands expertise and real
world best practices to understand how to map the needs of as a specific
company's website to the features available to develop the underlying
infrastructure.
Many companies have tried it on their own and failed. These
failures are manifested by missed deadlines, reduced functionality, lackluster
performance, and cost overruns. This all leads to disappointment which is not a
reflection of the underlying cloud's features but rather the inability to
select the proper components and configuring them to deliver what the website
needs.
VMblog: There are many
consultants and integrators who can help move a site to a new environment, why
is that not enough?
Trembley: For decades, there have been a range of consultants and
system integrators (SIs) supporting IT decisions. Many have expanded to cover
cloud deployments and can offer some valuable professional services. The
challenge comes from the fact that cloud capabilities are constantly evolving
and a company's need are also changing quickly.
Consultants and SIs mainly focus on one-time engagements and
are not usually motivated to stay engaged day-to-day with a company to evolve
their technology roadmap and implement changes. Clouds also require frequent
care and feeding which has to be handled by a team of experts who understand
what they are doing to keep the environment running at its best.
VMblog: Why do they need a
managed service provider and how does this add value?
Trembley: There is a growing ecosystem of managed service providers
who specialize in deploying customers in one or several of the large public
clouds. This is in part the result of needing experts who can guide the
selection of components. It is also the result of investments by companies such
as Microsoft to build out a network of certified partners who can reach
customers which their own teams cannot effectively scale to support.
Managed services are predicated on securing a recurring
revenue relationship between the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and the customer.
Contracts are typically one to three years with Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
and increasingly financial guarantees which the CSP stands
behind. The motivations for a CSP are very different. As a result, successful
CSPs bring real world experience and best practices which they rely on to
architect environments. They understand that whatever they build for a customer
will be their responsibility to maintain and evolve. This is why CSPs typically
have 24x7x365 support teams and manage end-to-end solutions including
networking, connectivity, security, and advanced monitoring which are integrated
as part of the environment supporting the customer's website.
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