Overcoming Impediments To Innovation With Customized Cloud Infrastructure

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all infrastructure portfolio. Every company has unique needs best served by a custom mix of infrastructure that may include public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and dedicated hardware.

Many vendors offer a blank-slate approach to infrastructure. Customers can buy the compute and storage they need, but it’s up to them to transform the units of infrastructure into a platform that conforms to their needs — something that requires time and expertise.

Lacking that expertise, companies make false steps that hinder the speed at which they can innovate. Markets move fast and the competitive environment is brutal. Smaller businesses often have a poor infrastructure experiences because, although they know what they need from their infrastructure, they have a hard time getting from here to there.

Most companies are not in the business of managing servers and data centers — and nor should they be. Businesses do best when they’re focused on innovation and fulfilling the needs of their customers. But it might seem that cloud or data center expertise is table stakes for taking a business to the next level.

A custom cloud platform, with the right mix of components and services, along with guidance from expert support teams and system administrators, allows businesses to focus on using their cloud infrastructure to generate value.

The needs of a healthcare company are fundamentally different to those of an enterprise service provider. The enterprise provider may need a hybrid cloud and bare metal platform, leveraging public cloud elasticity for ephemeral workloads and development, private cloud for mission-critical operations and storage of sensitive data, and bare metal servers for high-performance data analytics.

The healthcare provider is likely to be less concerned about the exact mix of modalities and platforms if the compute and storage both meets their needs and provides HIPAA-compliant infrastructure.

In both cases, the company should be free to focus resources on projects that provide the most value to their customers. A company’s technology platform should be a solution, not another problem to be solved.

When the company wants to launch a new project, building the infrastructure to support it should not be front-of-mind. Rather, consultations with a managed infrastructure provider with an understanding of the needs of healthcare providers, startups, and enterprise organizations should produce options and solutions for the company to choose from.

I’ve been in the infrastructure hosting field long enough to have seen projects scuppered by a poor understanding of infrastructure requirements and management. Perfectly viable business ideas that could have generated substantial value for a company went nowhere because of technical debt, because infrastructure lead-times were too long, or because the company simply didn’t have the expertise to bring their ideas to fruition within budget.

In 2017, that doesn’t need to happen. When your business is about to launch a new product or project, or is looking to update its infrastructure portfolio, don’t go it alone — leverage the expertise of a flexible managed infrastructure provider who can provide exactly the infrastructure you need, when you need it.