Sponsored Post: The Misadventures of Cloud Computing

The following post represents a republication of this Virtustream blog post with a few minor edits to the text in paragraphs one and two. The post was authored by the Virtustream editorial team.

In collaboration with Virtustream, Cloud Computing Today is excited to debut the first illustration in a five-part cartoon series by Tom Fishburne, “The Marketoonist.” With some techie humor and a touch of irreverence, our “Misadventures of Cloud Computing” series sheds light on the day-to-day challenges facing CIOs and IT leadership teams as they navigate the complex enterprise cloud landscape.

Cloud Computing Today will be unveiling a new Virtustream cartoon every Monday for the next five weeks that puts a comical spin on what really matters when selecting an enterprise cloud solution – security, reliability and performance. We hope you check back in regularly for a midday chuckle and we encourage you to share your perspective and experiences on each cartoon’s theme.

Server Huggers. We all know them – the folks that are hesitant to say goodbye to something they can touch and feel, physical servers, for something distant and and intangible. And while it is not actually about “where to put the coffee maker,” cloud reluctance is usually an emotional reaction. Change can be unsettling.
At first blush, it makes sense. Enterprise IT departments manage complex landscapes and moving complicated, mission-critical legacy apps to the cloud is no small feat. And the thought of experiencing any downtime during the transition is a disconcerting one. Often times the stress and complexity of the transition can be misinterpreted as an aversion to the cloud all together.

But transitioning your enterprise to the cloud, even in the most complicated instances, can be a smooth, secure ride if you have the right partners on board to lead you through the journey. And while some IT departments feel like the servers they can see and touch are more safe or dependable than ones they can’t, both security and reliability are fundamental to enterprise-grade cloud service providers who offer continuous enterprise-wide monitoring on a large scale. They have a big stake in ensuring that your data remains safe and you experience zero downtime during and after the move to the cloud.

While it may be counterintuitive at first, moving to the cloud helps enterprise IT gain control of their systems and data, not the other way around. When less time and money is spent managing hardware and day-to-day upkeep, IT can put more resources into pursuing interesting projects that could make a significant impact on the business.

For more information, check out Virtustream’s LinkedIn page.

Virtustream is the enterprise-class cloud software and service provider trusted by enterprises worldwide to migrate and run their mission-critical applications in the cloud. For enterprises, service providers and government agencies, only Virtustream’s xStream™ cloud management platform (CMP) software and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) meet the security, compliance, performance, efficiency and consumption-based billing requirements of complex production applications in the cloud – whether private, public or hybrid.

ViON Partners With Virtustream To Deliver IaaS Cloud Services For Government Customers

ViON Corporation recently announced a partnership with IaaS vendor Virtustream that empowers it to deliver enterprise-grade cloud-based services to government customers. By partnering with Virtustream, Vion extends the purview of its services from storage and server solutions for datacenters to public and private cloud solutions as part of a strategy to build market traction within the increasingly lucrative market for cloud services for government agencies. The Virtustream-powered ViON Cloud allows customers to access Virtustream’s xStream-powered IaaS products and services to complement their on-premise datacenter infrastructures. In addition, ViON offers application migration and sizing functionality that facilitates the effective migration of on-premise workloads to the ViON cloud. Finally, the ViON partnership with Virtustream enables the development of private cloud solutions for customers that meet their own internal requirements. As such, ViON proposes a three pronged cloud offering marked by public cloud, private cloud and application migration services for government and commercial sectors in addition to consultative support regarding the achievement of Federal compliance requirements for cloud-based data. The partnership between ViON and Virtustream means that government organizations seeking cloud services now have, in ViON, a vendor with a long history of serving the IT needs of Federal and public-sector organizations. Meanwhile, Virtustream benefits from ViON’s relationships with government and commercial customers to accelerate the adoption of its IaaS technology within the government cloud space. Given the acknowledged depth and history of ViON’s relationships in the Federal and public sector space, and Virtustream’s active pursuit of FedRAMP certification, the ViON-VirtuStream partnership stands poised to introduce another serious contender to the government cloud landscape.