Picking the best IaaS provider - Critical factors to consider and compare

When selecting a cloud provider, many Enterprises choose a couple providers based on factors like cost, independent of the workload. It's not until an issue arises or costs run up that they realize they might not have made the best choice for each application - but the damage has already been done. Rather than guessing, what if you could take a data-driven approach so you can select the best-fit provider for your distinct workloads?

Join Ilyas Iyoob, Director of Advanced Analytics, and Lani Dame, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, as they share what Enterprises consider when making cloud decisions and how analytics can help you make the best-fit choice for your applications.

What happens when you combine the leading service provider with the leading cloud brokerage software? You get greater visibility and control of your complete environment — both traditional and cloud — while still maintaining choice of providers and services. Learn more about how IBM and Gravitant capabilities can help you source, provision, and manage IT services — across all cloud models, regardless of provider — understanding where to preserve existing IT investments and where to leverage new compute systems resulting in reduced risk, increased speed and agility, and potentially lower operating costs … all at the same time.

Are you keeping up with the demand for “instant IT”? With public cloud alternatives, it is even more critical for internal IT organizations to deliver a superior, self-service experience, one that will incent organizations to go through standard IT channels.

In this webinar, we will cut through the clutter and break down the key considerations and capabilities that are needed to transform the user experience. Provide best practices on how to manage the complexity of choice and how to create an effective bridge to existing processes.

Join Gravitant and we walk through how to build a superior self-service IT experience providing choice and speed your users require.

Don’t fear Shadow IT, it offers great value to the organization, IT needs to work to minimize any possible negative impact from security risks and spend control challenges. IT should take a dual approach:
•Provide users an approved consumption path for public cloud, with no barriers
•Gain a new level of access and visibility to cloud resources, allowing IT to manage security risks and monitor spend

Join Gravitant to learn how to provide users a “carrot” without the “stick” through an approved marketplace for purchasing public cloud. At the same time, you give IT the visibility and traceability to manage security and costs.

With enterprise cloud adoption on the rise, CIOs are faced with creating a cloud strategy that will deliver greater business value and innovation. And while most are turning to hybrid cloud, this model does not factor in legacy infrastructure or give business users the unified experience they demand. The true solution is an integrated, multi-sourced operating model called Hybrid IT. The 451 Group VP of Research William Fellows shares why moving to the Hybrid IT model is the most complete approach and best practices for selecting the process and tools to get started.

Sometimes one cloud isn’t enough. In a recent study by IDC, more than 65% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016. In this webinar we will walk you through a case study on a large enterprise customer who optimized their cloud strategy for performance, capabilities, and costs by using a multi-cloud approach. The results were outstanding - $1.5 million in annual savings from examining only 15 apps out of 500 app portfolio. Join Ilyas Iyoob, Director of Advanced Analytics and Lani Dame, Sr. Product Marketing Manager as they walk through this customer success.

77 percent of IT professionals are planning to deploy to multiple clouds within the next 12 months, based on a recent Dimensional Research survey. Why the movement to multi-cloud? Organizations are learning not all clouds are created equal and understanding how to identify the right provider and service to strike a balance between cost and capability is key. Maximizing the value of a multi-cloud strategy and building multi-cloud application architectures requires a robust catalog, ability to compare providers against key application characteristics, and way to easily collaborate and design a multi-layered architecture. In this webinar we walk through the identification and design of a multi-layer, multi-cloud architecture highlighting how the planning and design tools from Gravitant can augment current processes and speed the planning and design of a multi-cloud solution.

Service catalogs have traditionally been focused on delivering internal resources but with the growth of cloud usage, IT must now extend this process to external cloud services. Yet, current service catalog functionality does not match the dynamic nature of cloud or have the fast and easy buying experience users expect, causing a lack in visibility and control for IT.

Join Gravitant as we talk about a new concept emerging called the service store, which provides users the experience of an app store while being powered by a dynamic service catalog. Learn how using this approach can set the foundation for your cloud strategy in the key areas of multi-provider management, governance, cost visibility, and more.

Planning is critical to success in the instant IT paradigm of cloud computing. Make the wrong Cloud decisions and you could be looking at six and seven figures to clean up the mess.



So plan for success by leveraging intelligent decision frameworks built solely for clouds, cloud knowledge base, and your IT organization’s rigor and discipline. Plan comprises of a three phase approach:

* Assess
* Compare
* Design


Join Gravitant’s dynamic duo, Mark Carroll and Kong Yang, as they walk through real world examples from customers leveraging the planning framework best practices.

The design phase of an application architecture is usually the longest and most challenging. Collaboration across IT silos and getting all the required expertise in the same room takes time.

Imagine if you could design virtual data centers (VDCs) from a comprehensive IT-as-a-Service catalog that includes public, private and virtual resources as well as the complementary managed services required to architect a true enterprise-class application architecture.

Gravitant cloudMatrix offers a multi-layered, multi-environment design tool allows you to design complete IT solutions collaboratively, in a fraction of the time.

Leveraging cloud providers to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service is a growing trend, but choosing the right provider should not be taken lightly. There are more and more providers entering the market and each offering is structured differently, making it a complex and time-consuming process to determine which offering is the best fit for your business. Join us as we walk through what you should consider when comparing providers and how the Gravitant cloudMatrix provider compare, powered by a patented normalization engine, delivers you the best match in minutes. The cloudMatrix compare solution doesn’t just look at costs but also compares all the key attributes to making a decision including security requirements and SLAs.

The complexities of cloud are no more apparent than when IT attempts to integrate cloud into their existing processes. The value of cloud, it’s easy, fast and inexpensive, can be quickly overshadowed by the complexities of integration into standard operations.

In this webinar we will share some tips and tricks on how to get started in cloud with the end in mind, incorporating the cloud while avoiding many of the hidden costs organizations are facing.

As the robustness of public cloud services steadily advances and prices continue to drop, public cloud is becoming a mainstream technology for many business. Its growth is creating challenges that cannot be ignored by IT leaders:
• The size of Shadow IT has created tangible security and compliance risks
• IT is under increasing pressure to accelerate the use of multiple public clouds in its overall data center infrastructure strategy
• IT needs to provide a centralized means for business units to consume a diverse range of internal and external IT resources in a way that provides agility and choice while still providing control

Join David Linthicum and Praveen Asthana in a discussion of a three-part approach to address these challenges by leveraging a cloud services brokerage model on the path towards delivering IT-as-a-Service.

About David Linthicum:
David S. Linthicum is a Research Analyst at Gigaom Research. He is an internationally recognized industry expert and thought leader, and the author and coauthor of 13 books on computing, including the best-selling “Enterprise Application Integration” (Addison Wesley).

About Praveen Asthana
Praveen Asthana is the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Gravitant. Prior to joining Gravitant in 2012, he was Vice President of Dell’s $12B Enterprise Solutions Group where he led marketing and strategy. Praveen received his B.S. degree with honors from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California. He holds two U.S. patents and has been published widely in leading magazines.

Creating a service catalog is a critical first step in delivering cloud services and enabling users to order and consume IT services directly. Though a service catalog appears as a list of services to the users, to IT it represents a supply chain of services across various service types, levels, and providers. Organizations must consider a catalog solution that can be flexible to the needs of the business and grow with IT as they adapt to the cloud era.

Join Gravitant as they outline characteristics and considerations for developing a service catalog. We will walk through what you need to consider when looking for a service catalog solution: automation, flexibility, contract pricing and dynamic catalog options.

One of the more challenging aspects of cloud adoption is identifying if an application is a good fit for cloud, and what cloud is the best. Gravitant has taken their extensive knowledge and developed a wizard-based tool that determines the business value of moving to the cloud, the amount of effort it will take to make the application cloud ready and what type of cloud is the best fit for this particular app. Join us to learn more about the key criteria to consider when assessing an application and how we enable IT to assist the business in this determination.