“The number of cloud consumption and payment models on offer to businesses continues to grow. Indeed, practices such as cloud bursting have been hailed as a way in which businesses can make their on-premise resources elastic and only pay for extra resources when needed. However, in practice, ad-hoc uses of cloud can be complex and result in unexpected costs,” commented James Butler, CTO, Trustmarque. “At a time when cloud pricing is becoming more complicated, Cloud-ESP is a critical building block in our strategy to simplify organisations’ cloud journeys, giving them an easy way to ensure they have the right cloud controls in place. This level of control and guided adoption minimises the all too common ‘unplanned spend’ that cloud can cause. Trustmarque has helped over 1,000 companies buy and adopt cloud services, and all of this experience guides our development of Cloud-ESP – by digitising our traditional consultancy and support interactions with customers, we are advancing towards our mission to continue to simplify IT and enable it be delivered ‘as-a-Service’.”
One of the biggest challenges CIOs face when it comes to cloud is the risk of cloud sprawl and the proliferation of unsanctioned cloud applications. Cloud-ESP provides a ‘one-stop-shop’ that helps CIOs reduce the adoption and management challenges of cloud, and decrease the associated security risk. The key features of Cloud-ESP will help businesses:
- Control cloud costs by removing the need for multi-year contracts or daunting up-front fees, and helping them reduce risk and limit cloud costs through a PAYG model managed through the portal’s dashboard.
- View and track cloud spend instantly via the portal’s dashboard, which provides visibility into cloud consumption and license usage. Users can monitor peak spend periods for improved financial reporting and management; manage automated spend notifications; and identify unallocated licenses to reduce compliance risks.
- Access a range of support and managed services that can be provisioned in hours rather than weeks, billed on a consumption basis, and with online access to a 24/7/365 service desk and full enterprise managed service capabilities.
In conjunction with Cloud-ESP, users will be able to procure a range of Trustmarque services built on Microsoft cloud, backed by Service Level Agreements that provide enterprise-ready levels of comprehensive support. Initial services available include:
- Microsoft Azure-on-Demand (AoD): For many organisations the initial adoption of Azure is complex, costly and challenging. Trustmarque’s AoD service removes uncertainty and gives organisations more control over their IT, helping to achieve maximum gains from Azure.
- Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS): The impact of unplanned disruption can leave businesses unable to meet customers’ needs or even render them noncompliant with industry or government regulations. DRaaS reduces this risk, and removes the complexity and cost of procuring, operating and maintaining a secondary datacentre.
- Back-Up-as-a-service (BaaS): Maintaining systems that cannot meet policies, requirements and timeframes represents a significant risk. BaaS is a simple and reliable cloud integrated backup solution contributing to business continuity and disaster recovery, a solution that protects your data and your applications on your on-premises servers and virtual machines.
- Virtual Machine (VM) Management: The ongoing management, maintenance and optimisation of cloud is a significant distraction for most IT departments. VM Management services are designed to overcome these challenges and focus on adding value to your organisation, rather than simply keeping the lights on.
Over the last six months, the focus on simplifying cloud for enterprises has attracted over 50 customers from both the public and private sector to Cloud-ESP; including government bodies, financial services organisations and larger retailers. Further, being able to manage cloud procurement, usage, invoicing and technical support in a single portal, with unified managed service, spanning multiple vendor licensing channels, is unique for users. Customer feedback to date has repeatedly mentioned the benefit to their organisations of gaining increased insight into the cloud services in use in their organisations, and in helping to decide on a future cloud strategy.
“Cloud-ESP has provided us with absolute insight into the spend associated with particular workloads and components, giving us more confidence to adopt Azure as our cloud platform,” commented Stuart Nicols, Head of Business Applications, The Scottish Parliament.
