Tangible business benefits to grow cloud in 2013
2013 will be the year that more businesses maximise the potential of the cloud as they take a closer look at applications, according to Node4.
The data centre and communications firm, which launched its n4Cloud solution last year, has said that the discussion of cloud computing will go beyond merely adopting the infrastructure. The focus will broaden to take on the benefits that cloud based applications will deliver.
Paul Bryce, Business Development Director at Node4, said, “While businesses want to control and reduce costs, they also want to grow, improve efficiencies and innovate. Having powerful, reliable, scalable IT systems in place is a direct contributor to this. This year will be the year in which applications become the focus.
“The end user within a business is not concerned about whether their service is run on a dedicated server in a computer room in the office or in an external data centre. What is important to them is the type of application available and that the service level agreement around that application guarantees it will be available to them 100% of the time. Utilising cloud services in the right way allows them to achieve this and therefore this is how more applications are going to be delivered to businesses.”
For many companies, 2012 was an eventful year with disaster recovery remaining on the agenda following floods in the UK and storms in the US. Disaster Recovery will continue to be an inherent feature of cloud services as it can offer flexibility to businesses in the way users access their applications and data.
Paul continued, “At the back end, we are going to see many more software vendors delivering their software in a Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) model so that businesses can rent licences rather than buy them to fit within the expected cloud pricing model.”
ABOUT NODE4
Node4 is a data centre and communications specialist. Launched in 2004, the company has grown rapidly in the past nine years through its comprehensive service offering and the growth in demand for hosted IT from businesses all over the UK. Its competencies include colocation, managed hosting through cloud and virtualised environments, connectivity, SIP trunking and hosted telephony. It has four state-of-the-art data centre facilities, two located in Derby and one in Leeds and one in Northampton, which offer the latest in security technology, ensuring that even the most mission-critical applications are hosted securely and protected.
The company aims to be one of the UK’s major forces for colocation services in the UK and to this end, provides the highest levels of performance and system availability to its customers throughout the UK.
Node4 ranked 45th position in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 and won 1st place for fastest growing Midlands Technology Company in the Deloitte Fast50 and 22nd in the UK. The company also featured highly in 139th position of the Deloitte Fast 500 recognising fastest-growing technology companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Node4’s Managing Director, Andrew Gilbert, was named European Data Centre Entrepreneur of the Year 2011 and Ernst & Young North and Midlands Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2011. Node4 is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, a Cisco Premier Certified Partner and also won the prestigious Cisco Innovation Award of the Year for the UK and Ireland.
