How does the cloud benefit Internet Service Providers?
Internet Service Providers (ISP), who have traditionally built services to deliver communications capabilities to their customers, already have a wealth of knowledge wrapped around packaging, delivery, and management of those services. Many ISPs also offer hosted services such as web, messaging, or file storage hosting. These all are various types of cloud services, and ISPs develop many methods to streamline delivery of those services to introduce cost savings with automation, and security and compliance with standardized policies. Most ISPs are looking to extend their market reach and offer more robust services, which requires cloud platforms that can provide advanced resource pooling, on-demand self-service, broad network access, rapid scalability, measurement of consumption, as well open encapsulation and portability of service workloads. These features allow the ISPs to deliver the services at a low cost, which can contribute to their customer satisfaction and financial bottomline. VMware vCloud Director and the vCenter Product Family provide a cloud platform that delivers those cloud features to our ISP partners, and interacts with their existing ITSM processes to fit their application and infrastructure service delivery model as well as service management. VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform also provides a robust and cloud-aware development platform to develop and deliver application services.
What can the cloud do for a school network?
The need for computing resources in schools is increasing and there is no better way to meet the need than cloud, especially in the US where many colleges and school districts are facing stiff competition for students amidst budget cuts. With cloud computing, academic IT leaders can:
• Consolidate existing datacenters
• Drive down costs while providing access to more services and users
• Keep data and applications secure and available
• Protect privacy and sensitive information
• Support the proliferation of end-user devices
• Maintain and improve service-level agreements (SLAs)
When institutions begin their journey to the cloud with virtualization—an IT transformation starting point that preserves existing investments—they realize significant agility, cost and security benefits.
Which carrier suits me best?
The beauty of the Cloud is that it is your choice, and something that you aren’t locked into. Our open approach to building a Cloud ecosystem means that customers can select providers based on the criteria they value – and not because they are the only choice. Just like mobile/cell phone carriers, different offerings are suited to different customer needs. We recommend you first start with exploring and understanding your organization’s needs, and then talking to a few providers to find which can best fill those needs. Importantly: as your needs change, you still have the choice to move.
