Cloud services you may not have known about  

When you say cloud, most companies only think of shared data that can be accessed from anywhere. However, cloud solutions also have other uses that can save the company money, energy, and, most importantly, its data is taken care of by specialists. For example, do you know what OaaS is?

In the past, when running custom software that was the foundation of a business (such as an online shop), organizations traditionally had only two options. Some of them chose to build a complex environment using their infrastructure and security operations using their capacities, while some decided to use the services of cloud providers and their infrastructure as a service (IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service) or a platform as a service (PaaS - Platform as a Service).

Nowadays, cloud solutions offer companies technological and user benefits as well as ecnomic benefits - they save the company money. However, cloud data and related IT services need professionals who specialize in this work. It often takes them years of work to gain experience and knowledge that cannot be learned quickly when a problem arises.

Specialists can also help in cases where everything cannot be moved to the cloud - then we are referring to a hybrid IT environment. And here you need experience not only in the operation of the cloud but also in the local, so-called on-premise, IT infrastructure.

It is at this point that OaaS (Operation as a Service) comes into play. It is another way to reduce IT expenses and even increase its quality.

How does it work?

First of all, you need an IaaS, PaaS provider (such as IBM Cloud, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace) to provide the building blocks of a virtual infrastructure. They enable you to build an environment according to the set requirements as well as with regard to high availability and disaster recovery.

"Working with cloud solutions from IBM proved to be successful for us - interestingly, a lot of companies do not even know that, just like Amazon and Microsoft, IBM also provides a cloud, when in fact it offers more than 190 types of cloud services. Cloud solutions appeal to us in general because they are very quickly and easily scalable for clients. For example, do you need to increase server capacity? You are just a few clicks away, with your payment card in hand, and you will have it within minutes. This is an advantage for the customer - the end company. From our expert point of view, there are, of course, numerous other advantages, based on which we can guarantee continuous services for even the largest companies, even the use of artificial intelligence," explains Marián Benko, who, in addition to being the Chairman of the Board of eGroup Solutions, a. s., also deals with the digital transformation of companies.

Benefits of using OaSS

The benefits of usinig the most comprehensive OaaS service will be fully realized when problems arise.

"A good example from practice is the vulnerability related to SSL security certificates, when clients' environment was updated within a few hours of announcing the problem - while minimum or no intervention was required from the client," illustrates Marián Benko.

He states that "all proposals of the changes in architecture, operational solutions or security patches that affect a single customer are likely to affect many other customers, while it is possible to innovate all environments simultaneously using the experience of multiple IT operations we manage, whether in the cloud or on-premise. At the same time, the IT environments operated by us are always under the supervision of the so-called Zero Downtime Center - the tool with modules to support IT management. Zero Downtime Center uses several open-source technologies to secure its key functions, along with IBM software components licensed in Embedded Solution Agreement (ESA) mode, which allows IBM software to be used as a part of ESA partners' solutions." 

The provider of such a service cooperates with the client to learn everything necessary about his system requirements and subsequently manage and control the entire implementation of these requirements into a reliable production environmnet with minimum downtime. At the same time, it can help design the use of the cloud and OaaS for a disaster recovery strategy in the form of providing a service (DRaaS - Disaster Recovery as a Service).

"Operation as a Service (OaaS) eliminates the need to employ the company's own IT system administrators, who in fact manage a small number of applications and cannot have that much experience from several IT operations," concludes Marián Benko.

Source: TREND

To learn more, email us at  sales@egroup.sk