All businesses have IT hardware they need to house. Whether it’s a handful of servers in the corner of the office, a larger estate of multiple servers or some racks in a comms room.

This requires reliable power distribution, cooling systems, and much more infrastructure for the servers to operate optimally. The cost of housing servers, therefore, requires a significant level of capital investment that many organisations simply can’t afford.

That’s why many businesses are turning to colocation. In this article, we discuss the meaning of server colocation, why it’s more cost-effective, and how it could help support your IT growth.

Contents

• What does ‘server colocation mean?
• How much does server colocation cost?
• The advantages of server colocation
• How safe is it to collocate your server?
• How to collocate your servers

What does ‘server colocation’ mean?

The definition of ‘server colocation’ is the process of housing an organisation’s compute, storage, networking and security hardware in a purpose-built data centre, owned and operated by a partner.

Using a data centre removes the need for your business to spend money and resources on housing servers on your own premises. You simply move your existing equipment into pre-built racks, and the data centre looks after the supporting infrastructure. We will take a look at what some of this infrastructure is below.

How much does server colocation cost?

It’s important to understand the factors that can determine your colocation costs.

The commercial goal of colocation is to avoid the up-front capital expense of building your own hosting facilities. This is done by following an OPEX model of paying the colocation provider only for the hosting space and services you need.

Our colocation contract terms are flexible. We allow you to rent a space as small as part of a shared rack, up to multiple racks locked in your own secure cage. You can even have a dedicated private room within the facility, depending on your needs.

The point here is, you only pay for the capacity you use. Billing is monthly, and you don’t need to commit to lengthy contract terms. Furthermore, as your IT needs grow, your data centre footprint can scale accordingly.

This system saves you having to pay the up-front costs of expanding your own on-premise server room.

The advantages of server colocation

• Frees up your IT resources
  • A colocation service provides engineering staff responsible for maintaining the facility and responding to issues 24/7.
• More cost-effective
  • We house multiple customers within each data centre, allowing us to spread the cost of maintaining the facility. For you, this means benefitting from economies of scale.
• All the infrastructure is provided
  • The data centre provides the building fabric, power feeds, cooling systems, generators, CCTV cameras, maintenance engineers and back-up servers.
• More reliable
  • Power outages and loss of network connectivity are major disruptors to IT operations, and in business-critical or customer-facing IT systems, any downtime will result in loss of custom and reputation.

How safe is it to collocate your server?

The ISO 27001 accreditation for IT security management covers all of our data centres. Each one is designed from the ground up to be reliable.

As part of our server colocation package, you can expect:

• Multiple redundant cooling systems
• Multiple power feeds
• High-capacity, enterprise-class UPS systems
• On-site diesel generators,
• Steel perimeter fencing preventing access
• Internal and external CCTV
• Diverse network connections

The latter takes services from several different telecommunications carriers to minimise the risk of communication outages. Your IT will continue to function and serve your customers even after a component failure.

Because we own and manage the entire environment that houses your servers, it provides us with clear visibility of any issue affecting your collocated servers and vastly increases the speed of diagnosis.

Where can I collocate my servers to?

One of the potential downsides to the colocation approach is it can mean long travel times if your engineers need to physically access your hardware.

To mitigate this, we own and manage a range of data centres across the country, with excellent transport links.

All of our data centres are constructed to enterprise-class specification, allowing you to choose a facility that is geographically convenient for you.

We also offer a ‘remote hands’ service, where our engineers act on your behalf in carrying out essential maintenance, repairs, or upgrades to your collocated equipment. That means, in many cases, you can avoid sending your own engineers entirely.

You still own the servers and you are responsible for setting up and configuring them. Your own engineers will have access to them 24/7 if required.

How to collocate your servers

If you’re interested to find out more about server collocation, you can contact our team today. We will be happy to find a solution that meets your business needs.

The post What is Server Colocation? appeared first on Pulsant.

The role of the data centre has changed drastically over recent years.

As the rapid rise of AI, the cloud, and virtualisation continue to shift the information technology landscape, data centres have had to adjust to keep up with new processing demands.

In this article, we take a look at what a data centre is, how they work, and why many businesses are making them central to their day-to-day operations.

Contents

• What is a data centre?
• What does “colocation” mean?
• How reliable are data centres?
• How much do colocation data centres cost?
• Where to find data centres
• Data centres and compliance
• Benefits of multi-site backup and disaster recovery
• Managed cloud and other services

What is a data centre?

The most basic definition of a data centre is simply a facility that a business uses to house its IT equipment.

While you could place your network servers in a corner of your own office, many modern businesses require their mission-critical IT systems to be secure, reliable and easily accessible.

This involves a significant amount of facilities infrastructure, which includes backup generators, cooling systems, power supplies and more. It requires a level of capital investment beyond the reach of most SMEs.

For that reason, many businesses will make use of the colocation services provided by third-party data centres, such as ourselves.

What does “colocation” mean?

Colocation simply means placing your own IT equipment in pre-built racks in a data centre. This isn’t just servers, but associated equipment like storage devices, network switches and firewalls.

In doing so, you can let us take care of running the facility itself, while you concentrate on running your IT systems.

As previously mentioned, the data centre will also provide the infrastructure needed to function, including:

• Power supply and distribution
• Uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) for reliability
• Stand-by generators for use in the case of a mains power failure
• Ventilation and cooling for the IT equipment
• Fire detection and suppression systems
• Physical security and access control
• Network connectivity to the outside world

At Pulsant, we own and manage all of these elements. We also host multiple businesses within each of our data centre facilities, so we’re able to keep costs at a minimum for you.

How reliable are data centres?

All of our data centre infrastructure has multiple levels of redundancy.

This means mains power is taken from more than one supplier and is backed up by on-site generators. These automatically engage if mains power is lost.

Redundant Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) systems ensure that if one fails (or is taken out of service for routine maintenance) other units will take up the load. For you, this means an uninterrupted service.

Similarly, cooling systems have multiple redundant units, allowing one to fail or taken out of service for routine maintenance without impacting the facility’s cooling ability. All of our data centres have multiple incoming lines from telecommunications carriers, providing reliable connectivity for your hosted systems.

All of these systems are regularly tested. For example, we will simulate a loss of mains power to demonstrate that the generators will adequately take the load in the case of a real emergency, with no loss of service.

Colocation data centre support

The most important part of supporting all this infrastructure is, of course, the people.

Maintaining the building fabric, the power, cooling sub-systems, and the security of the facilities needs knowledgeable staff.

As with the physical elements of the data centre, recruiting and retaining this team of people would be prohibitively costly for many businesses. With your equipment housed in a data centre, however, you have experienced engineers working for you 24/7.

Typically, businesses find that colocation hosting improves business operations, cuts capital costs and increases the reliability and availability of service.

How much do colocation data centres cost?

In our data centres, you can occupy everything from a shared rack up to your own secure cage. You can even have a dedicated private room within the facility, depending on your needs.

Our data centre colocation services are priced according to the physical space that your servers take up in the data centre and the amount of power they draw. Additional charges may be made for networking provision and for any server maintenance tasks you ask our engineers to carry out.

As your IT needs grow, your data centre footprint can scale accordingly, with none of the up-front capital expense you would need to expand your on-premise server room.

Where to find data centres

There are potential downsides to consider when moving your equipment into a third-party data centre. One of the main issues is the distance from your own offices.

If using our on-site staff isn’t suitable and you need to send your engineers to attend to your servers, the distance and associated travel time needs to be considered.

That is why our data centres are scattered across the country and include excellent transport links.

Our colocation data centre estate includes enterprise-class facilities at:

• Edinburgh Medway data centre
• Edinburgh Newbridge data centre
• Edinburgh South Gyle data centre
• Maidenhead data centre
• Milton Keynes data centre
• Newcastle Central data centre
• Newcastle East data centre
• Reading East data centre
• Sheffield data centre
• South London data centre

All of our data centres are designed to offer the same high levels of enterprise-class service, allowing you to choose a facility that is geographically convenient for you.

Data centres and compliance

A great data centre should measure itself against global standards.

At Pulsant, we hold independently-verified certifications in multiple standards, including:

• PCI-DSS SP 2.0 (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)
• ISO 27001:2013 (Information Security Management)
• ISO 9001 (Quality Management)
• ISO 14001 (Environmental Management)
• SSE Green Certificate (for purchasing 100% renewable energy)

These certifications are only awarded after rigorous independent auditing and show our commitment to the highest levels of service and security.

In a highly-regulated industry, you may need to show compliance with some or all of these standards yourself. Hosting your systems in a certified data centre provides an essential tick in the box.

Benefits of multi-site backup and disaster recovery

Another key benefit of moving your IT into our data centres is geographical resilience.

By mirroring your systems between geographically-separated data centres, you can make sure that your systems continue functioning in the event of a localised disaster. This wouldn’t be the case if your systems were all housed in a room in your own office.

For this reason, even businesses that run their IT from their premises often use a third-party data centre as a backup. The disaster recovery options provided by dispersed data centres should form a key part of the business continuity planning of any organisation that relies on mission-critical IT systems.

All of our data centres are connected by our multi-gigabit core network, allowing the fast and reliable transfer of data between the facilities.

Managed cloud and other services

Colocation is only one way to use a data centre.

Many organisations find it makes commercial sense to outsource IT management entirely to service providers such as ourselves.

In addition to data centre colocation, we provide public and private cloud services and a range of managed server services, all hosted from within our data centres.

Should your server estate become too large or complex for you to continue to manage yourself, you could migrate to one of our managed server solutions. This could be either on dedicated hardware we manage for you or on shared infrastructure in our Enterprise Cloud service.

To find out more about our services, contact our team today and we’ll be happy to find a solution that fits your business.

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In a landscape characterised by intense competition, changing technology and fast-evolving business needs, the ability to demonstrate compliance is becoming even more important.

Whether it’s driven by industry regulation or customer demand, you will be called on – at some point – to demonstrate your compliance with standards and certifications.

In this article, we discuss data centre compliance, what accreditations we hold, and why you should be careful when choosing a third-party provider.

The importance of data centre compliance

Data centres should be compliant with a range of recognised standards. We consider this to be paramount.

The importance of compliance is not just to tick the box of an abstract regulatory requirement, but to add real value to your business by guaranteeing a secure, reliable, consistent, and continually improving service.

In a highly-regulated industry, you may need to show compliance with some or all of these standards yourself. Hosting your systems in a certified data centre provides an essential confirmation of your commitment to security and compliance

All our data centres are designed from the ground up to ensure that your servers are physically secure. This approach means that our colocation services don’t complicate your compliance issues, but, instead, make it easier.

What our data centre accreditations mean

A modern-day data centre should have the highest level of physical security. At our data centres, you can expect multiple access controls, internal and external CCTV, steel perimeter fencing, and visitors escorted by staff.

Implementing these measures has earned us several accreditations. These certifications are only awarded after rigorous independent audits and show our commitment to the highest levels of service and security.

BSI – ISO 27001

 ISO/IEC 27001 is a global best practice framework for an information security management system (ISMS). By achieving this certification, we can demonstrate our ISMS meets international best practices and holds up to scrutiny. For you, this means we can handle your information securely.

BSI – ISO 14001

This is a globally-recognised environmental protection standard. ISO 14001 is used across the world to reduce environmental impacts and is an excellent framework to help implement an environmental management system (EMS). By having this accreditation, it demonstrates our ability to measure and improve on identified areas of environmental responsibility.

BSI – ISO 9001

 ISO 9001 is the Quality Management System (QMS) standard. Earning this accreditation means we can streamline operations, reduce costs, and continually improve our quality management system. You can take peace of mind, then, that we are always looking to identify areas for improvement.

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant

The PCI-DSS standard specifies the minimum security processes to be applied to protect payment card data and transactions carried out.

We have been assessed against the PCI-DSS physical security requirements at our data centres in Edinburgh Medway, Maidenhead, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, South London and South Yorkshire.

 Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR certificate

Cloud computing has opened up many new opportunities, but it also presents several new security risks. This certificate shows that we have one of the highest standards in the cloud security industry. For you, it means continual progress, demonstrable safety, and transparency.

SSE Green Certificate

SSE Green demonstrates our commitment to only using 100% renewable energy. That is, clean electricity generated by wind and hydro assets. You can be confident that the electricity we use to house your data is renewably sourced and has zero carbon emissions.

Advantages of data centre compliance

Data centres are our business. That means we have a greater degree of security and compliance than many organisations could achieve on their premises.

Partnering with us as your colocation or managed hosting provider means that you don’t have to keep abreast of ever-changing compliance requirements. You can leave it to the experts.

Regulatory controls that would be burdensome for you to understand, implement, document, and demonstrate in an audit have already been implemented in our data centres.

We can provide the certificates to prove this to your auditors. That means your IT professionals can be freed from the need to deal with compliance frameworks and, instead, perform work that will directly benefit your business.

ISO data centre compliance

The ISO approach to certification requires a continuous programme of audits to ensure continued compliance. The audit is structured around a defined global list of requirements and controls, which independent audits will confirm that we remain compliant with.

Our certifications are valid for three years from the point they are awarded. However, during that period, a schedule of on-going audits are established to show that the management system is constantly reviewed using a sampling approach. This is also to ensure that a development and improvement cycle is undertaken.

Come and see for yourself

For further peace of mind, you are free to come and audit our data centres yourself.

Subject to the agreement of suitable controls to protect our other customers, we will allow physical penetration testing of our facilities.

Want to find out more about how we keep your data compliant? Speak to our team today.

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With data centres playing such a key role in business today, you need assurance that your hardware and data are secure, available and performing as they should. But where do you start? Host in-house at great expense? Or outsource to a trusted provider like us?

Find out all about our Colocation service, including:

• How colocation can help your business
• What the benefits of the service are
• Why our enterprise-class data centres meet your needs
• Which features are important when choosing a colocation provider

Why Pulsant for colocation?

“We’ve built our business and reputation on delivering high-performing, secure and reliable data centre services to our host of customers across the public and private sector. It is our unique combination of expertise, experience and state-of-the-art technology that makes us the ideal colocation and data centre partner for your business.” Marion Stewart, Chief Operating Officer

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Edinburgh, UK – 19 August 2019 – Pulsant, a leading UK provider of hybrid cloud services, has been awarded a place on the Scottish Government’s newly launched Cloud Services Framework. The framework has been designed to help Scottish public and third sector organisations maximise efficiency and collaboration by aligning with the strategic priorities in Scotland’s Digital Future.

Pulsant is offering its own private, public and hybrid cloud solutions on the framework, as well as hyper-scale cloud services and its colocation services.

“This is a tremendous step forward for the public sector in Scotland and we are delighted to once again be included on the framework and to continue to support organisations in the region,” says John Easson, Head of Sales — public sector and enterprise (Scotland), Pulsant.

Pulsant has a significant presence in Scotland and is the largest colocation provider in the country. Three of its 10 owned and operated data centres are located there, with its South Gyle site the largest in Scotland.

The company already works with a number of public sector organisations in the region, and has a wealth of experience in delivering colocation, cloud and data centre services to customers.

The framework supports digital initiatives in the region, including the Data Hosting and Data Centre Strategy and has replaced the Scottish Government’s four-year Hosting Services Framework.

“Public sector organisations are already using cloud in various forms and enjoying its benefits. Moving forward there will be an increased drive to ensure they are fully capitalising on the cloud opportunity and optimising its usage. This new framework makes it easier for organisations to evaluate suppliers and ensure they can procure the right set of solutions and support — which is a really important step in helping Scotland realise its full potential as a digital nation.”

Pulsant executives will also be on-hand at the Holyrood Connect Cloud Services in the Public Sector Conference on the 18th September 2019 to discuss how Pulsant is helping public sector organisations to transform and optimise their technology investment.

The post Scottish Government selects Pulsant for new Cloud Services Framework appeared first on Pulsant.

The Witherslack Group is a leading provider of specialist education and care for children and young people with social, emotional and mental health needs, communication difficulties, ADHD and complex learning needs. The organisation is headquartered in Cumbria with a network of schools, children’s homes and integrated learning centres across the country.

The challenge

Five years ago, the group was seeking an efficient, safe and streamlined way of hosting data across all its sites. This was driven by poor performance of its existing platform and the fact that several schools experienced server issues and downtime, which impacted on operations.

As a provider of specialist education and care, the Witherslack Group had specific security and compliance requirements around the data it held. In addition to education records, individual schools and care homes are also responsible for storing medical information. Pulsant worked with the Witherslack Group’s IT team to refine the project’s requirements and find a solution that met the need for resilience, performance and availability.

The Pulsant team designed, developed and implemented a private cloud solution for Witherslack and the relationship has flourished ever since.

The solution

“Pulsant is very solutions focused, finding ways to help us overcome our IT challenges, while offering excellent levels of consultancy, from the account management team, to the technical team,” explained Stephen Hall, IT director at Witherslack Group.

Based on these requirements, Pulsant delivered a hosted private cloud platform for the education group that enables the organisation to manage and support all IT needs from a centralised location. In addition, with an installed wide-area network (WAN), individual sites have better access to the data they need. This is especially important given that some sites, such as the children’s homes, run 24 hours a day.

“Due to the types of data that the schools and children’s homes have access to, nothing could be hosted in public cloud. We worked closely with the team at Witherslack to design and deploy a solution that not only met the requirements for compliance, but also delivered the overall benefits of cloud to users, such as reliability, flexibility and availability,” explained Darren Semple, senior account manager at Pulsant.

As the relationship between the two organisations progressed, Pulsant offered more support services around the private cloud itself, as well as network support, taking over from an incumbent provider that wasn’t able to meet Witherslack’s requirements.

The Pulsant team also worked with Stephen Hall and his team to develop a hybrid email solution as the group had significant outages of Microsoft Exchange in the past. In addition to resilience, the email solution needed to include significant storage and archiving functionality.

“The Pulsant team is an extension of our own IT team,” said Stephen Hall. “They’re responsive and receptive, really helping us get the best from our IT investment. Which is why we engaged them to help us with an email storage and archiving solution.”

As an independent provider of specialist care and education, regulations state that Witherslack needs to store many communications for a period of 75 years.

The result was a Mimecast solution that specialises in cloud-based email management for Microsoft Exchange. This includes security, archiving and business continuity for emails. The solution works across two servers and Mimecast, making it resilience, with guaranteed accessibility.

“We haven’t experienced an email outage since the solution was implemented, which is exactly what the end users were demanding. In addition, staff find the encrypted portal and the ease of encrypting external emails very beneficial. Mimecast has also massively reduced our spam and ensured we have remained secure against malware.”

Moving forward

The relationship between Witherslack Group and Pulsant is ongoing, with the cloud provider assisting in an overall hardware refresh, as well as continuing to deliver support and provide expert consultancy.

This is especially relevant in an evolving education environment where traditional teaching methods have changed in the last few years and new solutions have had to be implemented to adjust to the shifting demands. A case in point is the recent rise in the use of video in education. Witherslack Group worked with Pulsant to ensure it had the right infrastructure in place to support video streaming and the solutions to support these operational changes.

“As a centralised IT team, we deal with over 45 sites in the group and our needs are constantly evolving. From offering us support on making sure our private cloud is delivering the performance it needs to, to offering wider support around networking and other solutions that can help streamline our organisation, Pulsant plays an invaluable role, as both an extension of our own team and in the innovative and creative solutions they come up with. The account management is exceptional” concludes Stephen Hall.

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Managed hosting is managed infrastructure in an external data centre provider’s facilities.  This can consist of servers, storage, networking and more, depending on the service you need.  It’s the next layer up from co-location services.

Managed Hosting gives you the ability to tailor your IT services to fit your business compared with true cloud services. This is especially useful for customers with legacy IT environments who may not be able to move all applications or workloads over to a cloud solution or a virtualised environment.

Some Managed Hosting services are delivered up to and including the Operating System (OS) layer, whereas some go up to application layer. Some providers offer Platform-as-a-Service as part of their Managed Hosting offering; such as delivering database servers to customers for them to install their own applications.

Managed hosting is usually physical servers with an OS provided to the customer by the service provider for them to manage.  The service provider is responsible for the OS and hardware maintenance, whilst the customer manages everything above the OS.

Who does Managed Hosting suit?

Managed hosting suits organisations who want to specify the build of their servers and storage down to the last detail, or for organisations who may need that little bit more control over their IT environment and how it operates compared with traditional cloud services.

Managed Hosting providers can deliver the infrastructure and OS layer whilst supporting and monitoring all systems, leaving you to manage your own applications and services.

For applications or industries that require workloads and data to be kept separate from other customers, organisations can instead choose dedicated Managed IT environments without the burden of delivering the services from within their own data centres.

This helps customers who need to achieve certain compliance or industry regulations, as they often need to have their systems delivered in a more bespoke or dedicated model.  For example, certain Government organisations are required to keep their IT systems and data separate from other companies so may need dedicated servers and storage.

On the other hand, a company might want to move their entire IT environment to a cloud model to reduce Capex costs, but need a solution that can continue to support their legacy IT environment.

Different Managed Hosting options:

What is Dedicated Server?

Dedicated Servers are dedicated, physical servers that the service provider houses in their server racks.  The service provider sets up the OS and networking so that customers can connect into the server to manage everything themselves.

In this scenario, the service provider monitors the health of the physical server, and provides availability and support assurances around the physical functioning of the server.

This is for customers who want to manage their own physical servers from the OS up, but don’t want to house the server or be responsible for the physical health of the server.

What is Managed Server Hosting?

Managed Server Hosting offers more support than Dedicated Server.  In Manager Server Hosting, a service provider delivers the server and OS layer to the customer, but also offers a wider support capability and more comprehensive SLAs, often including some platform services around applications and performance monitoring.

Managed Server Hosting can sometimes overlap with cloud services where the service provider also includes some degree of application management on top of the servers.

What are Virtual Private Servers?

Virtual Private Servers are like dedicated servers, but they are virtual – not physical – machines.  This means the physical hardware is shared between multiple customers.  However, Virtual Private Servers often don’t have the same scaling ability as true cloud services, so these are designed for more static environments.  The virtual server is delivered to the customer and they then manage the installation and management of their applications.

What is Managed Storage Hosting?

Managed Storage Hosting can fall into two categories: dedicated and shared infrastructure.

In dedicated storage hosting, a service provider manages the physical storage in their data centre, and monitors the physical health of the storage array whilst the customer accesses the storage array and manages everything else themselves – such as how data is replicated, stored or what type of storage the data resides on.

For dedicated storage hosting, there is a minimum entry price and capacity requirement as an entire storage array needs to be purchased for a particular customer.

In shared storage hosting, a customer takes a slice of a shared storage array, meaning they can access enterprise storage without minimum price and capacity restrictions.

In cloud storage, usage is based on consumption and charged for based on how much capacity is used.

What Are Managed Desktop Hosting Services?

Hosted desktop services are where desktop instances sit in the central data centre, rather than on individuals’ PCs and laptops.  Desktops are delivered virtually to devices, so the risk of losing data or a device experiencing downtime is lower as everything is managed centrally by a service provider.  Patching, monitoring and support is delivered centrally.

There are two options for customers exploring Managed Desktop Hosting:

Shared Session: Users are sharing a central desktop, and accessing a centralised ‘view’ of their desktop and applications through their local devices.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): In VDI, a user’s desktop sits on its own virtual machine so when they connect, they access their own customised virtual desktop that can be tailored to each user.

With Managed Desktop Hosting, customers can choose between dedicated environments or shared infrastructure where multiple organisations are using the same physical resources to reduce costs and reduce the barriers to entry such as the number of users or capacity.

More control

With evermore focus on achieving cloud compliance, a shared, standardised cloud environment may not always be the answer for certain applications and data.  That’s why customers may choose Managed Hosting services which can be tailored to suit your exact needs, within a hosted environment.

For legacy applications and systems that can’t move to the cloud, Managed Hosting and Dedicated Server offer an alternative to bridge the gap between in-house IT and cloud services.

In short

Managed hosting enables you to choose exactly what you want.  So, perhaps you want to host a mix of virtual and dedicated servers with an external hosting provider, but plan to keep your storage at your own data centre. In this scenario, a cloud service might not be able to flex to meet your needs across your entire IT environment.  However, a Managed Hosting solution from Pulsant can be crafted to fit your specific IT and business requirements.

Find out more about Pulsant Managed Hosting services and options.

The post What is Managed Hosting? appeared first on Pulsant.

Although cloud can be very intuitive and simple to configure, for many businesses without an in-house IT team skilled in cloud service delivery, configuring and managing your cloud environment can still be a complex task.

Pulsant’s Managed Cloud service takes on the management of your cloud environment, helping you with all stages of the process, across:

• Designing your cloud environment
• Planning your cloud environment and migration plan
• Moving your services to your new cloud environment
• Ongoing management and monitoring of your cloud environment
• Securing your cloud environment
• Ensuring your cloud environment is as performant as it can be

Using a trusted Managed Cloud provider takes away the worry of keeping your cloud environment running as efficiently as possible; ensuring that any capacity issues, bandwidth needs and potential cyber threats are monitored and dealt with quickly and proactively.

Without a managed cloud service, organisations need to manage their own billing, cloud design, configuration, storage and networking requirements. This in addition to, proactively monitoring the risk of cyber-attacks and ongoing maintenance can be a big task for existing IT teams to take on, so many look for a cloud provider like Pulsant to support them with their hybrid cloud environments.

Pulsant offers a range of different Managed Cloud options, across:

• Managed Azure IAAS
As a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider, Pulsant can manage and support your Azure environment, making moving to the public cloud easier than ever.

• Managed Office 365
Delegate the management, administration and support of your Office 365 environment to Pulsant. We can configure and migrate your systems over to Office 365 and then provide an ongoing fully managed service and support package.

• Pulsant Private Cloud
For when you need UK-based, enterprise cloud services in a secure and bespoke environment, Pulsant’s Private Cloud is the answer. And, our support and operational teams can manage the environment for you as a fully managed cloud service.

• Managed Azure Stack
If you need a hybrid mix of true public and private cloud services, then Azure Stack could be the answer. We can deliver Azure services from our enterprise UK data centres, and migrate services seamlessly over to Microsoft’s Azure cloud on-demand.

• Managed AWS
Unsure how to configure and manage AWS services as your IT requirements in the cloud become more complex? We can help with our managed service offerings around the AWS cloud.

• Pulsant Enterprise Cloud
Delivered from UK data centres and using the most robust, industry-leading technology, Pulsant Enterprise Cloud is your reliable choice for enterprise cloud computing needs. And our managed service wraparound helps you to bridge the gap between your in-house data centre technology and full public cloud services. This is a way to experience managed cloud services, with the security, availability and robustness of an enterprise data centre environment.

Why use a Managed Cloud service?
Cloud can seem easy. Sure, for simple applications that are ‘cloud ready’, moving to a public cloud environment can be straightforward.

But for enterprise IT environments, with a mix of services spread across public cloud environments, SaaS solutions and in-house IT, mixed with legacy applications that aren’t cloud-ready, moving to the cloud can quickly become complex.

That’s why Pulsant’s Managed Cloud service takes the pain out of the entire process. Our teams can walk you through the steps, from design and planning, through to migration and ongoing support and monitoring of your cloud environment.

Do I need a Managed Cloud service?
Many of our clients who we deliver Managed Cloud services for still retain their in-house IT teams to deliver frontline support or strategic IT projects. However, many organisations don’t have IT professionals in-house who have the experience and training to configure and deliver many of the industry-leading cloud services, and instead choose to work with technology partners like Pulsant to fill in any IT skills gaps when it comes to cloud.

Our teams are accredited to deliver, configure and support the leading cloud services, alongside being highly experienced in delivering Pulsant’s own cloud services.

There’s a few reasons why using our experts to deliver your Managed Cloud service can drive more value from your cloud investment:

• Compliance
Our experience and technical expertise will ensure your cloud environment adheres to the necessary cloud compliance regulations, such as GDPR and the Data Protection Act.

• Performance
We can help you to get the most out of your cloud’s performance and proactively identify any potential issues using our monitoring tools before they impact on your business.

• Cost-effectiveness
Get the most out of your cloud investment by using your capacity more effectively. We can quickly and easily scale your bandwidth up or down to match your business needs.

• Security
We get security. So let us focus on securing and monitoring your cloud environment so that you can focus on what really matters: your business.

Find out more about Pulsant’s Managed Cloud services, and the different options across the cloud services suite to find a solution that fits your business perfectly:

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