Education finds convenience in theCloud

With over 62,000 students in more than 800 schools being connected by the middle of 2012, the benefits of the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) and Broadband Internet is a hot topic right now. But what does this mean in reality and what opportunities does it present?

For Waikato-based institute of technology the journey to being better connected is under way and its relationship with theCloud is set to drive real innovation for the education sector. In November last year Wintec embarked on a multi-year strategy to reinvent its IT capabilities. A key to this journey is realising the potential of Cloud based services.

Wintec was already in a good position to take advantage of these opportunities by being well connected to several high-speed fibre networks. This enabled the tertiary education provider to transition from in-house server infrastructure to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from theCloud, whilst maintaining network performance and reliability.

For an established organisation, moving services into a Cloud environment might have seemed risky.

For Wintec the stability and flexibility that Cloud Service offered has resulted in a seamless transition for them. This was combined with benefits such as bringing on new and innovative services for its students quickly as well as affordably. An example of this was the launch of a new platform for colloboration leveraging Microsoft Sharepoint. Infrastructure as a Service enabled the launch of the platform in record time and with the confidence of knowing growing or shrinking the platform was a keystroke away. This fits Wintec’s strategy to be a leader in technology in the education sector.

Servers deployed on theCloud are always isolated in organisational private networks, unique to each customer. This private network configuration creates an opportunity for customers to extend their own local private networks to theCloud over secure point-to-point fibre connections. The end result is that servers deployed on theCloud appear on the local network of the customer as if the servers were deployed in-house. This further reduces any barriers to ‘going cloud’ and has allowed customers like Wintec to transition to theCloud with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.

So if there is any concern about a change in user experience when moving to theCloud, rest assured that the adoption of ultrafast broadband, or other such high-speed connectivity, will help break down these barriers.

Imagine a world with infinite data storage and computing capacity, combined with ease of use and an ever growing catalogue of relevant services – this is theCloud, get on it today!

Category: Cloud Services, Education, High-Speed Internet, Hosting Industry, Technology  |  Comment

What would faster internet access mean to your business?

We are hearing a lot about the Ultra-Fast Broadband work that is going on around the country, and there is a lot of excitement about what it will mean for the average Kiwi business. However, when the conversation digs a little deeper we find that whilst most business owners believe the new high-speed networks will benefit them, there is little or no clarity about how.

If you consider what you use the internet for today, then making it faster would be convenient but not necessarily worth spending more money on. So let’s look at what benefits the high-speed networks will enable for businesses to make it worth-while; saving money, creating efficiencies in the business that drive growth, and removing risk.

Here at theCloud we are working on next generation services that will leverage the high-speed Ultra-Fast Broadband networks; we also already have a range of services that can give your business some of those benefits today. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is when you get server hardware and enterprise class services delivered over the internet as a monthly service rather than it being a capital investment activity.

So how does Infrastructure as a Service provide the benefits that will make high-speed network access a must have?

Saving Money – Virtual Servers on theCloud are very competitively priced, taking advantage of vast economies of scale, with a much lower overall cost if you consider the total cost of ownership when operating hardware onsite in your own business.

Creating Efficiencies – Deploying Servers on theCloud, anytime night or day, takes less than five minutes and means you are up and running when you need to be rather than waiting for hardware to arrive and time spent setting it up. Operational efficiencies are also created since theCloud support staff take care of all aspects of keeping your server online, including maintenance, security and the backup and restore of data.

Removing Risk – The typical scenario for a small business is that a single server will house all files and applications for the business and in some cases the email system too.

The decision to buy a single server would have been one of scale and cost, but this presents a number of issues:

• The server will last several years so you need to spend more today to get the performance and capacity you might need later.
• If the server fails, the down-time can be measured in days as you wait to have the server fixed or replaced. If the data is lost you then become reliant on the backups that may or may not have been successful in the last week.
• In three years when the warranty expires, you will need to undertake a fairly painful and costly transition to new hardware, and repeat this each cycle.

When you deploy a server on theCloud you instantly get the following benefits that mitigate the risks described above:

• The ability to add CPU, RAM and Hard Drive space as required so you only pay for the capacity and performance you need when you need it.
• Fault-tolerant storage and processing. All of theCloud Infrastructure Platforms are built using industry leading technologies with inherent fault-tolerance. Meaning if the physical host underneath fails, theCloud will simply reboot your server on another physical host, with no loss of data.
• Even hardware on theCloud has to be replaced every three years, but because we can move your server to another host while it is still running (you won’t notice anything) we can remove and replace our hardware without any down-time for customers.

If you would like to know more about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or any of the exciting plans theCloud has for the Ultra-Fast Broadband networks in the future, get in touch today!

www.theCloud.net.nz

Category: Cloud Services, High-Speed Internet, Hosting Industry, Technology  |  Comment