Enterprise IaaS

In a challenging economic landscape, businesses are having to change rapidly to respond to new market opportunities; changing customer demands; accelerating rates of innovation, and restructuring by merger or acquisition. These changes are being performed against a background of cost reduction, limited human resources and transformation to increase productivity.

The IT department has a key role in delivering against these challenges and they need to be able to react more quickly, scale precisely to changing demands and accurately predict costs to meet the new demands of the business. However, current IT infrastructure approaches are not sufficient to meet this because they lack the ability to scale capacity and cost up and down with changing demand.

Key questions IT leaders are asking are:

• IT innovation drives business productivity and competitiveness. How often does lack of resource slow down our development or test activity?
• How well does our IT infrastructure meet the needs of fast starting, short term business projects?
• How quickly and cost effectively does our IT respond to surges in demand from key applications such as websites?

Colt’s Enterprise IaaS is an on-demand IT Infrastructure which brings you the benefits of best in-class enterprise IT capability consumed as a simple instantly available per server service. This service is ideal for application development and test teams or projects which require rapid access to IT services for periods of a few months or business applications which need to rapidly scale up and down.

Benefits

Business: Enterprise IaaS allows IT to respond at the speed that the business divisions are responding to demands on them. It removes the typical delays for procuring IT hardware and software it also relieves the IT department of the demand for technical staff to perform the basic work of setting up servers. All of this is transformed to a simple process of online shopping cart ordering and management of your service; allowing you to run your business without shortage of IT assets or waiting for them to be made ready.

Financial:The service provides clear pricing through a catalogue that offers Windows and Linux servers with all running costs and licensing included. This allows budget holders and line managers to understand and forecast costs for projects. The service offers pay-as-you-go pricing based on hourly or monthly rates that allows line managers to align costs with the changing demands of business activity. When activity spikes resources can be made quickly available, and when activity drops those resources can be pared back to reduce the running costs.

Operational: The simple portal is designed to allow those who are not specialists in IT infrastructure to order, control and manage servers and storage. This increases operational efficiency because the end users are able to self-manage their own infrastructure requirements. The service is catalogue driven which means the users can only order fully proven ‘gold build’ servers that conform to enterprise IT policies, ensuring that the IT and corporate governance is maintained.

Technical: Enterprise IaaS is built from our experience of running ‘Cloud’ IT solutions since 2005 and uses leading vendor components from VMware, EMC and Cisco to ensure true enterprise grade performance. The service is backed by a 99.9% SLA for the availability of the platform in any data centre and the 24 hours a day, 7 days a week Support Desk in Barcelona is equipped with state of the art self-heal systems to remedy the majority of faults in minutes.

Enterprise IaaS is an on-demand IT Infrastructure which brings you the benefits of best in-class enterprise IT capability consumed as a simple instantly available per server, per hour service.  This service is ideal for application development and test teams or projects which require rapid access to IT services for periods of a few months or business applications which need to rapidly scale up and down.
 

Technical

• Easy to use:  This service is managed via a portal which has been designed to provide an easy catalogue style approach to procuring new services which demand only limited technical knowledge and yet allow the self-managing user to get servers that are ready to use complete with Operating Systems installed and licensed.  On-going management can then be carried out via the portal or the remote management approaches available to that type of operating system e.g. RDP. Role based access control allows the super user to define each users role and access rights to ensure correct separation of user types.
• Enterprise Grade Platform:  The ability of any IT infrastructure to deliver is dependent on the performance and quality of the underpinning infrastructure. Colt has worked with its strategic partners Cisco, EMC and VMware to create a platform which can deliver the performance, reliability and security that enterprises demand for their mission critical systems. These platforms deliver service from Colt’s own Tier 3 data centres which are fully compliant with the ISO 27001 security standard.
• Performance Network:  The total performance of any ‘cloud’ delivered IT service is always critically dependent on the performance of the network and Colt’s services are delivered through our Tier 1 Internet backbone which provides the capacity and performance you demand when you need it. The Enterprise IaaS also provides as standard a local load balancing capability to manage your traffic to achieve the best possible user experience.
• Secure: Our enterprise customers demand security levels from their service providers that are required by corporate policy, industry standards and regulators. Our service is provided with role based access control and firewalls to provide the control and protection your policies demand. We have our security independently tested and can demonstrate the platform capability to your auditors.
   

Commercial

• Flexible:  The service is provided without minimum contract lengths or fixed usage commitments. When you order a service the unit price shows the charging period and you can choose from hourly or monthly units.
• Predictable:  The service provides a simple catalogue of IT infrastructure which can be ordered allowing you to plan your IT workload and budgets easily. The costs can then be allocated by you directly to the business unit or project whether for internal reporting or direct charging purposes. Our pricing is fully inclusive of the Operating System license required for the server whether Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux.
• Invoiced:  Your usage is invoiced monthly allowing your business to use its normal purchasing control systems to manage budgets and payments – unlike credit card type cloud compute services.
• Local:  Colt has leveraged its extensive data centre assets to deliver this service from four European countries, France, Germany, Spain and United Kingdom – allowing you to choose where your data and IT is placed. Support is provided from our shared service centre in Barcelona in fifteen European languages.
   

Support

• You are in control: This is a self-managed service which allows you to control your own infrastructure and projects through the portal interface which allows you to select your choice of language from English, French, German and Spanish. However it is still a supported service with help and incident support available by telephone or email.
• Support that never stops: The support is provided from our European shared service support desk in Barcelona which supports all of the services we provide to customers. This means you have a single place to get support for this service and any other service that Colt delivers to you. The support is available 24x7 in fifteen European languages.
• Service speed and quality: When your business’ IT is mission critical then you need service that is focused on resolving problems quickly. Colt uses proactive monitoring systems which automatically initiate actions to fix problems. Almost 90% of service affecting issues are able to be resolved in minutes because of our automatic fault resolution systems allowing our skilled staff to focus quickly resolving more complex issues. Our commitment to your service quality is backed up in a comprehensive Service Level Agreement for the service.