eMeter, a global business, works with a number of installation partners to implement software solutions at utility companies around the world. They offer intensive “boot camp” training on how to properly install and manage its metering solutions. These boot camps are very system-intensive and require a lot of short-term resources to get an installation underway. After those first few weeks, their bandwidth requirements drop considerably. In the past, this meant buying enough hardware to absorb the impact of a heavy workload, with the full knowledge that the workload would soon change. A lot of their hardware was underused. The complicating factor for them is that it’s very difficult to buy a piece of equipment in India. Taxes and regulations are complicated. Some technologies aren’t available in every area of the country. As a result, it can take months to procure just one piece of hardware. To expand further into India—and to grow its footprint elsewhere—eMeter needed a more flexible solution for deploying compute resources on demand.

LAMCO, the operating company for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LBHI), was formed in 2010 to manage Lehman’s commercial real estate, mortgages, principal investments, private equity, corporate debt and derivatives assets. However, the unplanned Chapter 11 filing and subsequent sale of major Lehman divisions left LBHI with no systems in place to support the management and wind-down of its assets. The company was forced to quickly build an infrastructure and technology that would meet the size, scope and capacity requirements required by the estate. The challenge was to build an infrastructure that would assume peak capacity on day one and then be positioned to wind-down over time. The company began to look into cloud computing, as it offered ‘pay-by-the-drink’ pricing, scalability and the ability to manage the entire infrastructure as a single entity.

The financial services company, licensed in all 50 states for collections, relies heavily on their database-driven call center application. Any downtime results in financial loss and potential regulatory penalties due to the sensitive nature of the data they handle. With a small IT team, implementing an internal disaster recovery strategy was daunting, time-consuming, and expensive. The company needed a solution that would ensure real-time data replication, quick application recovery, and scalability as the company grows, all while keeping their IT team focused on strategic initiatives.

A centralized IT architecture for governments is not uncommon; yet the complex nature of the network can provide challenges. With a single overarching IT organization and several sub-organizations operating semi-independently, building the requirements can be confusing, particularly when the sub-organization’s requirements differ from those of the parent organization. The organization had specific requirements for their production and recovery environment to ensure continuity of service and network security. The first requirement stemmed from the concern that certain administrative staff needed access to their application, but due to the architecture of how their parent organization’s network was designed, they were having trouble identifying where the user originated from and how to gate the access and permissions each user should have. The second requirement the client requested was the ability to do extended tests for their recovery solution.

Codesigned, a technology services firm specializing in Microsoft SharePoint, needed a scalable, high-performance, enterprise-class infrastructure to accommodate growth and unpredictable client workloads. They also required a service provider with robust compliance measures and security levels to enable them to work with companies in highly regulated industries like healthcare. They sought a reliable and industry-proven cloud hosting platform. The company evaluated several large hosting companies, including Terremark, SunGard, and Dell, but found that most options did not provide the transparency and accessibility to their environment as well as a strong service mentality that could ensure a mutually beneficial partnership.

As Patronpath’s demand in the marketplace grew, the company began exploring options when it came to upgrading its computing infrastructure to keep up with demands. The organization realized the need for more IT personnel and infrastructure support, but could not justify the cost and resources to build and staff a datacenter from scratch. Patronpath began looking into cloud computing because it offered them the pay-as-you-grow pricing and scalability needed with unpredictable client workloads of online ordering for restaurants, which has the majority of server usage at lunch and dinner times. The biggest challenge and concern of moving to a cloud service was regulatory compliance and security. As the company handles online credit card transactions for its clients, Patronpath had specific requirements such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS). Patronpath needed the cloud providers being evaluated to demonstrate that they were in compliance with applicable regulations and could provide high levels of security before they would entrust their critical systems to the cloud.

WoundVision, a start-up in the wound care industry, developed advanced wound detection technology that utilizes personalized patient health data and infrared thermal imaging. However, as a start-up with limited resources and software that relies on a constantly updating and growing database, it was not feasible for WoundVision to host its own servers or manage and maintain them. The company's hosted application and database are accessed on hospital computers via standard internet connectivity, meaning a traditional on-premise solution would require each hospital to deploy or assign hardware plus constant updates to the database and application. Therefore, a cloud hosting provider with pay-as-you-grow pricing and scalability was necessary to host the company’s technology platform. A major concern for WoundVision was security. Providing a solution to the healthcare industry requires comprehensive security, strict records and data controls, forcing WoundVision to need to know exactly what is happening to the infrastructure and where the data is at all times.

Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana was facing a challenge with their disaster recovery (DR) plan. They had spent nearly $250,000 building a traditional DR solution that would adequately protect their critical applications. However, the solution required a high level of manual upkeep and was difficult to test. The recovery environment was growing more and more out of sync with the production environment each day, which decreased the likelihood of a smooth and successful recovery. When a capital investment was required in production, a similar investment was required in the DR environment. When a change was made to production, it had to be carried out in the DR environment as well. Staff members were spending too much time managing two environments.

The financial media company was sharing a colocation datacenter with a sister company. However, when the sister company was purchased, the colocation datacenter had an expiration date. The company’s small IT staff had already devoted too much time and resources to traveling to the colocation facility for changes and wasted additional time managing the assets. They had only six weeks to make the move without impairing their public-facing sites and applications. Procurement and building another colocation datacenter was out of the question, so they turned to the cloud. However, many cloud providers resisted their timeline.

The National Democratic Institute (NDI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C., works in every region of the world to strengthen democratic institutions, safeguard elections, advance citizen engagement, and support open and accountable government. In many countries where it operates, the IT infrastructure is anything but robust. Many groups in those countries have limited technical and financial resources to develop and sustain necessary IT assets. NDI can often provide them with that technology—but it needs to do so not just in a cost-effective way, but in ways that give their in-country partners the knowledge to manage their own programs after NDI has stopped providing technical assistance. NDI has piloted a VMware vCloud Director implementation coupled with access to Bluelock Virtual Datacenters hosted in the public cloud. Spence turned to Bluelock, one of the VMware vCloud Datacenter Services providers, for their expertise as they are an award-winning provider of cloud hosting solutions for the enterprise. Hosted in the public cloud, Bluelock Virtual Datacenters help companies get started quickly and deal with the unknown, while retaining the flexibility to adjust IT resources as their needs evolve.

Global Washington, a membership organization serving Washington state’s global development sector, was struggling with a limited database that was not effectively connecting its members. The database was not user-friendly and lacked the necessary constraints to ensure data accuracy. Furthermore, the organization did not have the resources or expertise to implement a more robust solution. They needed a sophisticated, state-of-the-art platform that could improve the visualization of members’ work and facilitate collaboration. However, as a nonprofit, they had to be mindful of their budget and could not afford to take on additional IT administration or maintenance costs.

F5 Networks, a Seattle-based application delivery networking vendor, runs a technical user community site called DevCentral. This site is a platform where over 100,000 global IT professionals collaborate with peers to enhance and create solutions to better deliver applications. DevCentral is a key competitive differentiator for F5, the recognized market share and innovative leader in its space. However, the success of DevCentral created some challenges that needed to be addressed. The biggest challenge was the ever-increasing number of users, applications, and modules. The more successful it became, the more the needs of every component grew. There were more users and internal customers, but also more globally-distributed users. There were also more security risks stemming from social application complexity and the open source framework. The DevCentral team identified clear changes that would be required to be made due to the stress on the system. They needed an improved understanding of application and infrastructure dependencies, better performance, and a manageable security plan.

DECA Financial Services, an accounts receivable management (ARM) agency, was founded in 2009. The founders had previously experienced significant capital expenditures on IT infrastructure and the personnel required to manage it. As a result, they determined that a cloud hosting provider with scalability and ease-of-use was necessary to host the company’s technology platform for the 2009 launch of DECA. The company operates in highly competitive environments within the ARM industry and frequently outperforms well-known players in the market. DECA tasked Milestone Advisors with finding an infrastructure solution that would enable flexibility and scalability.

eGov Strategies, a SaaS company, was facing challenges with maintaining and procuring systems that weren’t strategic to their business. They were spending too much time on these tasks, which was taking away from their core business operations. Additionally, they were facing increasing pressures on security and compliance due to their success with larger clients. They needed to improve the resiliency and robustness of their solutions by expanding their protection and security capabilities. They also needed a solution that would scale as they added municipalities.