Back in the good ol’ days of the 1990s, when the World Wide Web got its legs, most tech pundits saw it as a great equalizer for businesses small and large. That was especially true for businesses that wanted a larger market presence online than their offline physical footprint and limited marketing budgets might suggest.
Today, the great equalizer for businesses of all sizes are both established and emerging cloud-based services. Accounting, collaboration, CRM, email, project management, payroll and videoconferencing are among the thousands of online services available for organizations to choose from.
The rise of IT as a Service (ITaaS)
Even more, the concept behind Software as a Service (SaaS) has today grown to include IT as a Service (ITaaS). Whereas IT once was likely a large capital expense for organizations (and often a painful puzzle to operate), now they can buy customized ITaaS capabilities and capacity.
They don’t have to worry about upfront capital costs, patches, upgrades, cyber security or plugging anything in except an Ethernet cable to their router. Small wonder that more and more SMBs are ditching their data centers for whatever IT functionality they need via cloud providers. Clearly, SMB cloud usage is quickly moving from “early-adopter” to “early-majority.”
Sunburst Hospitality: a success story
Today’s cloud-based ITaaS was just the ticket for what suddenly faced Mark Elbaum, vice president of Information Systems at the Sunburst Hospitality Corporation. His company operates 10 hotels across the U.S. under such brand names as Best Western and Comfort Inn.
When he first heard about the coming sale of the hotel where the company’s modest data center resided, he had just six months to relocate its operations to the corporate office or migrate to an alternative — all without any service disruptions at corporate or its hotels.
“Servers were old, many needing replacement, costing time and money to buy, install and configure,” Elbaum says. “Also, our headquarters is prone to power outages, sometimes for a day or more, due to Northeastern storms.”
But like many business owners and managers, Elbaum wears a lot of hats. In addition to IT — and without any staff—he’s the liaison with the different hotel brands, while overseeing all Sunburst’s real estate, reservations and time/attendance systems, and its financial and budgeting systems.
ITaaS to the rescue
Elbaum decided an ITaaS approach would be a more cost-effective and time-saving alternative to relocating and upgrading Sunburst’s data center. After evaluating two vendors, he chose the Dell Cloud On Demand service. With its consultative approach and ability to broker services from a rich ecosystem of cloud partners, Dell Services matched Sunburst’s specific workloads with the most appropriate ITaaS solution from ScaleMatrix, a Dell cloud partner.
ScaleMatrix provides advanced cloud services using revolutionary data center designs for top performance. Unlike many public-cloud providers, which often oversubscribe their resources, the Dell Cloud On Demand service can match customers like Sunburst to the right partner for cloud compute and storage — delivering the predictability, control and performance they need.
Other benefits include:
- Significant operating cost savings
- Improved performance and availability
- Always up-to-date ITaaS infrastructure
- Flexibility and on-demand scalability for the growing business
Taking the next steps
Today Elbaum manages all his IT services, including core virtualized applications — Exchange, Active Directory, Citrix and 12 others — from his desktop. “In effect, Dell is my [IT] staff,” he says, which lets him focus his time on his many other duties. His ITaaS experience is a proven way for SMBs to offload the capital expense and bother of doing IT themselves.
Read more about Elbaum’s experience. And learn more about how Dell Services can offer you a full range of cloud solutions from a wide range of highly qualified providers, to address part or all of your IT requirements.