Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing represents both a significant opportunity and a potential challenge to our customers.

The opportunity is based in the flexibility of computing and commercials that this service offers, whilst the confusion comes from understanding how this strategy can fit into your existipng infrastructure, both functionally and strategically.

At Point to Point we believe we are ideally positioned to assist our customers in both of these areas and have developed our service and solution capability in the following ways:

Demystifying the Cloud

This area of our service offering is a direct extension of our Strategic Formation Service, which is based on engaging with our customers to help them understand the technology under consideration and how this applies to their environment as a strategy – link to SFS. This process applies just as much to the Cloud and in many respects is more relevant at this stage due to the uncertainty that exists around the model and the terminology itself.

In this capacity it is our role to understand our customer’s requirements and environments and to translate this to the cloud options open to you as consumers. In so doing we seek to demystify the concept itself as well as the most appropriate strategy to your organisation.

Stratus

This area of our business is based on our partnership with industry leading hosting specialist Rackspace. This relationship allows us to deliver our customers desktops and applications from a cloud based environment, focusing on the following two options:

1. Desktop to Cloud – this option is based on Infrastructure as a Service, provided and managed by Rackspace, with desktops migrated to the cloud through Point to Point’s expert consultancy. Ownership of the desktop is retained by your organisation and support of this tailored to include your internal resources with assistance from Point to Point where appropriate. Depending on the needs of your organisation Point to Point support perspective is delivered in either a proactive or reactive fashion. This area of stratus looks to deliver desktops from the cloud, but retains a traditional element of management and ownership.

2. MyDaaS – this area of our proposition extends our desktop2cloud offering by transferring full management and critically ownership of your desktop estate to the cloud. Desktops are provided in a fully managed capacity and critically supplied as a monthly subscription where the desktop environment is effectively rented and not owned by your organisation. This service is based on pre-defined desktops and in this capacity suits those users with a basic and essentially productivity requirement.

Connecting the Two

One of the current major complexities associated with the Cloud is the fact that this comes in many forms and as a direct result comes from many and varied sources. This presents a unique challenge to our customers in looking to embrace these different models and critically in trying to simplify and manage these.

At Point to Point this has led to an extension of our relationship with Citrix who understand the complexity of the three PCs – the Personal, Private and Public Clouds – and the need to simplify and aggregate these from an end user perspective. Combining these multiple feeds and presenting them in a simple and streamlined fashion is a new and increasing challenge.

Equally the fact that our users are increasingly making use of these disparate environments drives the need to simplify the process around making use of these discrete locations. If customers are truly to take advantage of the potential of the cloud then they need to easily flex between these – this is where Point to Point works with Citrix Cloud Bridge technology.

Point to Point and the Cloud is based first on understanding and secondly applying this knowledge to our customer's desktops and infrastructure.