Creating insights to Cloud usage

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Expanding capabilities

Did you know organizations that utilize public cloud services succeed significantly better than their competitors? Nordcloud, a cloud native company with a strong Nordic character, offers bespoke managed cloud services that help companies evolve using technology. Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Nordcloud does business in eight European countries, and for the past four years have been recognized as Finland’s fastest growing technology company. A one-stop shop for everything Azure Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) related, Nordcloud enables customers to go full speed as they approach the onramp to the public cloud.

As Nordcloud has expanded its reach throughout Europe, they have relied on local market specialists to best serve their customers. However, developing their next generation cloud services meant recognizing that some needs weren’t easily or efficiently tackled in-house. Nordcloud sought Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with a natural alignment to fill specific gaps in their offerings. They didn’t have to look very far to bridge the monitoring gap in their cloud solutions. Already a Nordcloud partner, Datadog, a leader in the cloud monitoring market, was an ideal partner to help extend their cloud solutions services.

Seamless partnership

Nordcloud delivers end-to-end solutions, everything from cloud strategy, migration, automation, managed services, capacity management, and training to help customers gain the maximum benefits of the cloud. Datadog monitors infrastructure from full stack OS to middleware, up to the application layer. They were selected as a partner in great part due to their incident management capabilities. Nordcloud integrates data from Splunk, ServiceNow, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Jira, Nagios, and Slack, to name just a few core integrations available out-of-the-box, with Datadog, to see the full picture. The bottom line, “Nothing will be unseen using Datadog,” said Paul Hudspeth, Senior Cloud Architect, Nordcloud UK. Leveraging Datadog’s full-stack monitoring greatly simplifies troubleshooting whilst allowing Nordcloud to better predict failures with such a comprehensive end-to-end monitoring.

Monitoring a cloud solution is the final stage of a managed service environment, and is key to reducing costs and SLA failures. Datadog addresses situations where clients have multi-tenant environments, or need more visibility than open source tools or legacy network monitoring tools could provide. By partnering with Datadog and integrating other solutions, Nordcloud focuses on their well-established expertise in overall public cloud management and consulting services. Once a client’s needs are defined, Nordcloud leverages proprietary tools and ISV solutions to create a seamless turnkey customer experience.

Cloud choices

Nordcloud offers four core services to work with every customer scenario. Leveraging partner solutions and their own proprietary solutions, Nordcloud is focused on helping lead the cloud revolution.

Cloud Duty is their over-arching 24/7 full-stack monitoring and incident response option for customer’s entire cloud infrastructure all the way up to the software application layer.

Cloud Guard focuses on and delivers maximum security which includes Trend Micro’s Deep Security as a Service (DSaaS) host security software.

Nordcloud had created its Cloud Care infrastructure management solution with their own IP called the Service Delivery Management (SDM) for those wanting focused and customized service delivery overall. SDM offers service/change request execution, service delivery management, a single view of cloud spends, incidents, and service requests.

Cloud Control ensures that the cloud infrastructure is always up-to-date and optimized, leveraging benchmark assessments on security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimization.

Performance efficiency is an import aspect of the modern cloud. Microsoft Azure provides a variety of compute options, based on the latest Intel processor technologies, including 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon^® E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) CPUs, that power mainstream Dv3-series VMs. Cloud Control ensures that the amount of computing power, assigned to the customer workload, is just right.

Evolving businesses

Getting clients comfortable making the move to a public cloud is an important step in evolving their business. Nordcloud offers a needs discovery workshop, accompanied by an audit of a client’s current infrastructure environment. Once the audit is done, Nordcloud provides cloud strategy recommendations, designs a cloud solution, and develops a project plan for its implementation. The project may be a small proof of concept or a full-blown server migration.

Quite often, clients believe that moving to the cloud will yield immediate benefits, particularly cost reductions. In some cases, this is true, but in most cases, it will take some time to optimize a brand-new cloud infrastructure. Initially the move from a CapEx (capital expenditure) model to an OpEx (operating expense) model will include some applications that cost more to run in a cloud environment. These applications may require application re-architecture and coding to gain the greatest benefit from the cloud. However, the opportunity for continuous improvement, one of the cloud’s great benefits, means that additional savings will be garnered on the journey from legacy hardware to the cloud evolution.

Creating insights

“The best part for a lot of customers is a single bill for Azure with details on the management/hosting costs,” said Hudspeth. “One bill makes it easy for customers to see how and where they are utilizing resources. Change comes with a new perspective and CSP helps support businesses evolve smarter and more efficiently.”

In fact, Nordcloud developed Nordcloud Insight, a customer portal to articulate cloud capacity management and cost optimization. It details costs and tagging, aggregation over accounts, capacity reservations, and analysis, in addition to incident/request ticketing and an API for customer integrations.

Nordcloud, Datadog, and other partners each serve as a resource to offer customers the best of what the cloud has to offer. The managed solutions offerings are much more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective for customers than an individual business cobbling together disparate vendors to create a solution. Nordcloud’s expertise and industry partnerships enable them to apply learnings and cost savings to cloud solutions, and are core to the continuing cloud revolution that is underway.