Challenge
British Rowing was looking for a solution that could consolidate the various platforms it relies on to run critical data analysis for its teams and provide online services to its members. The solution would also need to provide continuous, uninterrupted access to the data gathered and stored across each of those platforms.

Pulsant solution
Pulsant designed a bespoke private cloud platform which it hosts with its managed backup service providing security and scalability. Hosted in Pulsant’s cloud environment, the platform hosts competition administration and supports the new digital content platform British Rowing Plus while also helping British Rowing operate in-line with GDPR compliance.

Results
The bespoke Pulsant platform has updated, scaled and raised the standards of British Rowing’s data and content management platforms. Pulsant has also improved the security
and compliance of British Rowing’s IT systems and its hosting solutions will support British Rowing’s Olympic and Paralympic teams in their competitions.

The post Pulsant and British Rowing team up for success appeared first on Pulsant.

If you’re reading this article, then you might be tasked with finding out how hybrid cloud fits in with your company’s current architecture. Or perhaps you’re just curious about how this cloud computing approach works.

Either way, here you’ll find lots of useful information about what hybrid cloud is, the advantages are of using it, and what options are available for your business.

Contents section

• What is hybrid cloud?
• How do hybrid clouds work?
  • Private cloud
  • Public cloud
  • Hybrid cloud
• Advantages of hybrid cloud
• Limitations
• Who is hybrid cloud suitable for?
• Hybrid cloud implementation
• Our hybrid cloud solutions

What is hybrid cloud?

The term ‘hybrid’ is used in everyday vernacular and refers to things that have been combined to make something new. In the case of the cloud, ‘hybrid’ means a mix of different ‘types’ or environments.

In essence, it’s an architecture that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services to a third-party public cloud. Thereby creating a single infrastructure from which an organisation can choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload.

For example, it could include on-premise private clouds, externally hosted private clouds and public cloud services. It may also be a mix of UK-based hosting services with global hyperscale public cloud services.

Many organisations choose a hybrid cloud architecture to deploy their applications and data across a range of cloud environments. There might be instances where an application can’t be put into a public cloud for commercial or data protection reasons, so it is deployed internally or in a private cloud environment.

How do hybrid clouds work?

There are three main forms of cloud computing: private, public and hybrid. To understand how hybrid cloud solutions work, we first need to look at the differences between public and private clouds.

Public cloud

The public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public Internet.

In a public cloud model, a company is essentially renting a portion of its distributed data centre infrastructure. The third-party cloud provider delivers compute, network, storage, and application resources while maintaining management rights. Some of the largest service providers include AWS, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM, and Oracle.

Public clouds deliver cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). One of the main benefits for businesses is that the provider bears all the operational costs associated with hosting an application or workload. This offers you significant cost savings and takes the burden away from your IT staff.

Private cloud

As you might have guessed, the private cloud involves deploying infrastructure on your premises, as opposed to someone else’s. This is also called an internal or corporate cloud.

The corporate cloud can be offered either over the internet or via a private internal network. In the case of the former, many organisations build private clouds on rented data centres located off-premises to keep costs down.

Housing a private cloud yourself requires you to pay for the upfront expense of maintaining the equipment. You will also need the appropriate in-house IT experts to manage the infrastructure.

One of the main benefits of having a private cloud is that it gives you complete control over the computing environment and data. This may be pertinent to a company dealing with sensitive data or having to abide by strict regulations.

How does hybrid cloud differ to public or private?

Hybrid cloud allows companies to scale computing resources by allowing data and applications to be shared between both public and private clouds.

One reason you might want to do this is to gain the flexibility of the public cloud for basic computer tasks, while keeping sensitive data or intellectual property behind a company firewall via a private network. It also allows businesses to free up resources and make cost savings by delivering less mission-critical applications via the public cloud.

If you’ve already invested a significant amount of money into on-premise hardware, you can still use software as a service (SaaS) public cloud products for functions like customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning.

Hybrid cloud allows users to get the best out of both worlds, depending on the needs of the business, regulations and the data that’s being hosted. It can be used in many ways. It’s a good staging area, a good platform for building confidence in the cloud, developing a transformation programme on and carrying it out.

In the same vein, it may be a deployment model that must be used, either for compliance, regulatory, risk, latency or data sovereignty issues. Regardless, the benefits will depend on your business objectives.

The pros and cons of hybrid cloud

One of the main advantages of hybrid solutions is known as cloud bursting. This means if an organisation reaches maximum resource capacity, the overflow traffic is directed to a public cloud. This seamless transition from the private cloud is particularly useful for businesses that experience variable demand, such as those in the retail sector.

Here are some more advantages of hybrid cloud:

• Flexible policy-driven deployment to distribute workloads across public and private environments based on security, performance and cost requirements.
• Scalability of public cloud is achieved without exposing sensitive IT workloads to the inherent security risks.
• High reliability as the services are distributed across multiple data centres both public and private.
• Improved security as sensitive IT workloads run on dedicated resources in private clouds while regular workloads are spread across inexpensive public cloud to trade-off for cost investments.

Limitations of hybrid cloud architecture:

• It can get expensive.
• Strong compatibility and integration are required between cloud infrastructure spanning different locations and categories. This is a limitation with public cloud deployments, for which organisations lack direct control over the infrastructure.
• Additional infrastructure complexity is introduced as organisations operate and manage an evolving mix of private and public clouds.

Who is hybrid cloud suitable for?

There are multiple reasons why an organisation may choose to operate a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

It might be that your business has run out of physical space in your data centre. Or you are hosting a consumer website with the application databases placed on a private network. The opportunities for hybrid cloud solutions are gigantic and will depend on your business objectives.

Here are a few examples of situations where it can be useful:

• Organisations serving multiple verticals facing different IT security, regulatory and performance requirements.
• Optimising cloud investments without compromising on the value proposition of either public or private cloud technologies.
• Improving security in an existing cloud environment, such as SaaS offerings that must be delivered via secure private networks.
• Organisations that are still on their ‘cloud journey’. A hybrid cloud environment enables you to leverage the flexibility, scalability and the potential cost savings of the cloud without having to commit to moving all workloads to the cloud in one go.

Hybrid cloud implementation

How your cloud infrastructure is implemented will partly depend on the size of your organisation and business objectives. But there are a few considerations you should keep in mind, including:

• Defining the right application and data deployment model.
• Working in tandem with your enterprise systems.
• Assessing connectivity requirements.
• Assessing existing compliance frameworks and highlight gaps.
• Implementing security and privacy measures.
• Managing the cloud environment.
• Creating a backup and data recovery plan.

Our hybrid cloud solutions

As a hosting provider, we can offer you hybrid cloud solutions. We will bring all your different cloud environments together and manage them centrally. This gives you the ability to move data and apps between environments easily.

We will ensure everything ‘speaks to each other’ and that workloads can be moved from one cloud to another.

There are multiple ways of beginning your transition; the first (and perhaps most important) is understanding your organisation’s current state and defining your cloud aspirations. This can be done in several ways, including conducting a cloud readiness assessment, which determines your organisation’s current state and what’s needed to start your journey.

At Pulsant, we assess and baseline our customers against what we call a Cloud Maturity Matrix. The matrix acts as a guide to determine which cloud services are best suited to your business, by looking at how far along the migration journey you are. This includes looking at the various cloud services you’re already using, where you aspire to be, and then helps you plot a path forward, essentially helping you manage the process.

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

The post What is Hybrid Cloud? appeared first on Pulsant.

Following the transition by organisations across all industries worldwide to home working, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) now hold responsibility for ensuring their teams can continue operating as closely as possible to business-as-usual throughout these challenging times.

Although many organisations wisely had remote working systems in place well before the COVID-19 outbreak, such systems were usually only anticipated to be used by a relatively small proportion of the workforce for short periods. These systems have now been scaled out quickly to support extensive remote working.

So, what steps do CIOs need to take to ensure their infrastructure and systems are robust and able to cope with an increase in employees working from home?

Immediate questions to ask

Encouragingly, this remarkable expansion in remote working has for many organisations been accommodated by having the right infrastructure and cloud-based systems in place. However, there are some important questions to be asked to ensure compliance is maintained and data and information remains secure and accessible.

The most important thing CIOs need to consider is whether a move to large scale home working has implications on the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the company’s data.

• For confidentiality, this is looking at things such as whether the data centre is only accessible inside the company WAN / LAN and what difference access via VPN or published servers will have.
• For integrity, it’s about whether home working will increase the likelihood of data breaches or leaks, such as offline copies of documents or uncontrolled versions.
• For availability, CIOs need to understand what their data centre and cloud providers are doing to ensure they keep the lights on and cope with increased demand from all customers.

Another point to consider is that, if it hasn’t already, access to the data centre may become restricted due to the new social-distancing restrictions. In this case, CIOs need to ensure a remote hands service is in place and that steps are being taken to guarantee uptime. This means understanding what the company’s data centre and cloud providers are doing to ensure they keep the lights on and are able to cope with the increased demand from all customers.

Longer term implications

Aside from the immediate questions, there are also several issues for CIOs to consider around the implications of the entire workforce working remotely for a prolonged period. These include maintaining compliance and safeguarding data and confidential information, regardless of where staff are working.

Remote workers are still bound by the same policies, however, the measures to implement and control those policies may not be present at home, and the IT risk profile has changed in recent months with more frequent cyber attacks. Therefore, CIOs should consider implementing solutions such as monitoring software for data leak prevention, two factor authentication and network access control.

Another consideration is the additional workload on the VPN / proxy / external services. Typically, remote working platforms are designed to cope with sufficient capacity for a fraction of workers, rather than all, so any increase in capacity demands will need to be provisioned quickly. This extends to Internet bandwidth, both at throughput and carrier levels. Organisations using cloud-based services correctly should be able to accommodate a growth in remote working.  The key is to have scalable bandwidth and infrastructure, such as Pulsant Enterprise Cloud. Office 365 can also be used to balance workloads between on-premise data centres and public cloud.

Getting back to business-as-usual

While many organisations will already have had working from home policies in place, the reality is that having a 100% remote workforce is something most will not have planned for. And with the situation likely to continue for a while, organisations need to adjust. CIOs will need to take steps to reduce pressure on systems, perhaps by measures such as encouraging flexible working and the use of video conferencing systems.

By ensuring that they have a handle on their infrastructure set ups and leaning on the advice and support of trusted partners where applicable, CIOs can be confident that staff can keep working and delivering the high-quality service throughout and beyond this challenging time.

How can we help?

The Pulsant team remains at your disposal for any inquiries or need assistance you may have in the current situation.

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In a fast-paced world where demands on a company’s infrastructure are increasingly dynamic, and there is a huge need for compliance and security, private cloud has a significant role to play.

Find out all about our Private Cloud platform, including:

• How to capitalise on the benefits of agility and improved efficiency
• What makes Pulsant Private Cloud the right solution for your business
• How we can custom design the service to meet your needs

Why Pulsant for private cloud?

“With technology moving at such a rapid rate and organisations trying to remain competitive, businesses need the best tools at their disposal to take full advantage of cloud. Whether you want more security, to boost efficiency or improve agility, our technical expertise, knowledge of the market and experience in cloud means we can design a private cloud solution that will help you meet your business objectives.” Marion Stewart, Chief Operating Officer, Pulsant

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The cloud market has moved incredibly fast over the last few years, delivering several benefits to businesses, from cost savings and flexibility to scalability and high performance. It’s moved beyond the public versus private debate that went on during early cloud adoption and has evolved into something that addresses organisational appetite for innovation and technology solutions that are fit for purpose.

But in making cloud the first port of call for all hosting deployments and broadening adoption, are there any best practices that businesses need to consider? When it comes to technology there are always best practices and proven approaches that help businesses get the most from it and learn from other more mature adopters.

The same is true with cloud; to optimise your cloud environment you need a planned and structured approach to migration. Whether you’re adopting more cloud, such as AWS, or migrating to AWS for the first time, you need to take a step back and assess how you’re using cloud already and how you’re planning to use it before embarking on a transformation or consolidation strategy.

The objectives of this assessment include:

• A thorough review of your cloud platform, systems and operational processes
• A technical assessment aligning to vendor best practices, extensive experience and globally recognised benchmarks
• A security and compliance analysis of risks
• An assessment of budgets and capability estimates to help avoid overspending and optimise user experience
• A recommendation that provides a clear report of findings and expert guidance to drive identified efficiencies

Based on our years of experience in the cloud and managed hosting market, especially as an AWS Managed Service Provider and Advanced Consulting Partner, we’ve put together a list of things to consider:

1. Look at your drivers for cloud transformation or consolidation: These could be optimising cost savings, improving performance and productivity of your technology (and ultimately your staff), and enhancing your operational efficiency.
2. Discovery: We can help you take a look at your AWS environment, looking at elements such as whether your servers, storage and network can support your requirements. We also look at your operational and cost issues to ensure that you’re using the right suppliers to meet your needs.
3. Data collection: Once discovery is completed, we conduct a detailed technical audit of your AWS environment, using a host of tools if needed. This raw data is gathered and packaged for analysis in the next stage.
4. Analysis: We analyse the raw data to build up a comprehensive picture of your AWS infrastructure and how you are using it. We compare this to your requirements and produce a set of recommendations that allow you to realise your cloud goals.
5. Report: Our findings will be fully documented in a comprehensive report, focused on technical assessment but including cost, performance, security, business continuity, and operational processes. The report will highlight areas for immediate concern, areas to investigate, and opportunities for improvement, and provides the blueprint for a business-case justification if further action is required.

Once you’ve considered these steps and gone through the process, why should you work with the Pulsant team on deploying or optimising your AWS infrastructure?

Experience, know-how and reputation

With more than 20 years of experience in the cloud, colocation and managed hosting market we are well placed to deliver the most efficient and effective AWS cloud infrastructure to suit your unique business requirements. We understand the industry in which you operate, the challenges you face and your need to be more efficient, save money, improve agility and optimise your AWS performance.

By working with us you receive access to a wealth of AWS knowledge, as well as cloud expertise in general. We have the resources and skills it takes to deliver an AWS Managed Services solution that meets your needs and drives business value.

With us, you get the best in management, from infrastructure monitoring, access control, to maintenance and security.

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Private cloud refers to a cloud solution dedicated for use by a single organisation. The data centre resources may be located on-premise or operated by a third-party vendor off-site. The compute resources are isolated and delivered via a secure private network, and not shared with other customers and is customisable to meet the unique business and security needs of the organisation.

With greater visibility and control into the infrastructure, organisations can operate compliance-sensitive IT workloads without compromising on the security and performance previously only achieved with dedicated on-premise data centres.

The advantages of private cloud include:

• Dedicated and secure environments that cannot be accessed by other organisations.
• Compliance to stringent regulations as organisations can run protocols, configurations and measures to customise security based on unique workload requirements.
• High scalability and efficiency to meet unpredictable demands without compromising on security and performance.
• High Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance and efficiency.
• Flexibility to transform the infrastructure based on the changing business and IT needs of the organisation.

Suitable choice for:

• Highly regulated industries and government agencies.
• Technology companies that require strong control and security over their IT workloads and the underlying infrastructure.
• Large enterprises that require advanced data centre technologies to operate efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Organisations that can afford to invest in high performance and availability technologies.

Limitations:

• Expensive solution with a relatively high total cost of ownership as compared to public cloud alternatives for short-term use cases.
• Mobile users may have limited access to the private cloud considering the high security measures in place.
• The infrastructure may not offer high scalability to meet unpredictable demands if the data centre is limited to on-premise computing resources.

Find out more by visiting our Private Cloud page.

The post What is Private Cloud? appeared first on Pulsant.

Maidenhead, UK – 17 October 2019 – Pulsant, one of the UK’s leading providers of regional data centre services, has helped leading Buckinghamshire-based law firm B P Collins transform operations and improve productivity through the completion of a digital transformation project.

The project involved migrating B P Collins’ practice management solution and SharePoint estate to Pulsant’s Enterprise Cloud solution – a UK-based private cloud service. As part of a wider transformation initiative, the firm also moved its other applications to Pulsant, including migrating to Microsoft Office 365 from a hosted exchange platform.

Gina Connell, director of infrastructure, B P Collins explains: “We chose Pulsant due the size of the business, the locations of their data centres and, importantly, the company’s existing relationship with Peppermint, one of our key software providers. We want to build a professional team around us to form an ongoing partnership, supporting our growing needs, especially around cloud.”

Running in parallel to the project, B P Collins rolled out new laptops, moved offices and introduced software to streamline operations and boost productivity. Pulsant’s engineers worked with B P Collins’ internal IT team to update the structure of the firm’s on-premise technology deployments so that the user technology refresh could be carried out without business disruption.

“The nature of law firms is that they experience organic growth which means they tend to have many point solutions that really need bringing together and streamlining. From our experience in the industry, we have a deep understanding of this common challenge and are able to advise on the best way forward,” says Alexandra Douglass, client director, Pulsant.

“As well as migrating the firm’s infrastructure to Pulsant Enterprise Cloud, we helped consolidate their services which led to cost savings and a more streamlined environment,” adds Douglass.

Pulsant worked with a number of partners during the five-month long project which was completed in May 2019. This included management and legal software supplier Peppermint Technology, sharepoint provider TSG, and IT provider Infinity Group, who provided on-premise support for local area networking and wireless.

Connell concludes: “We faced numerous challenges in this complex project due to many moving parts and a fixed project deadline. This put pressure on all parties. However, Pulsant worked closely with us throughout, whatever the hour, so we hit our deadlines and completed the implementation successfully”.

The post Pulsant helps B P Collins digitally transform with its Enterprise Cloud appeared first on Pulsant.

Snapshot

AFG LAW is a full-service law firm providing expert legal advice to individual and commercial clients.

Challenge
Under forward-thinking new management, AFG LAW required a new IT supplier to help update its IT infrastructure to enable it to achieve its business goals. This included implementing remote working, opening a new office, and boosting security, all while remaining compliant

Pulsant solution
AFG LAW worked with Pulsant to create a safe, bespoke IT architecture, including Pulsant Enterprise Cloud that would replace its problematic on-premise systems. Pulsant also helped the firm achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation.

Results
AFG LAW has created a more secure and streamlined working environment, saving staff in some areas of the business up to two weeks of their time. The firm has enabled remote working which has also improved productivity and helps to attract future staff. AFG LAW can also now demonstrate to clients and other stakeholders that it has the right processes in place to mitigate cyber risk, helping to deliver peace of mind to existing clients and secure new business.

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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.

The post Pulsant supports Witherslack Group with private cloud appeared first on Pulsant.

Maidenhead, UK – 15 October 2018 – Pulsant, a leading UK provider of hybrid cloud services, has announced the appointment of Marion Stewart to the position of Chief Operating Officer. Stewart will focus on developing the company’s operations function to meet the changing needs of today’s customers.

With more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Stewart brings proven expertise in leading transformation projects and enabling businesses to deliver best-in-class customer services around public and private cloud.

Niclas Sanfridsson, Pulsant CEO, says: “This is an exciting time to be joining Pulsant. The IT landscape is evolving rapidly, and we are expanding our service offerings to address this.   Marion will report directly to me and focus on embedding hybrid cloud services at the heart of our new operational platform – building on our already well-established data centre and managed services offerings in a secure and compliant way.”

Stewart has held senior operations roles at Alternative Networks, Control Circle and most recently at Daisy Group where she worked as Group Operations Director.

“I am delighted to be joining Pulsant and relish the opportunity of developing new service offerings to meet the demands of our customers. Pulsant is leading the way in hybrid IT and I look forward to helping businesses address their security, compliance and transformation requirements, now and in the future,” says Stewart.

Stewart will be based at Pulsant’s Maidenhead office.

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