“It is an honor to be recognized by SmartCEO magazine for this award,” said George Naspo, CEO. “It is our goal to stay innovative and lead with our cloud and disaster recovery solutions. I think we are in great company with the other finalists and we look forward to the event on May 30, 2013 at the Press Club.”

Virtacore is a leading cloud services provider specializing in virtual infrastructure solutions utilizing VMware. With over 12 years of experience in cloud and internet services, Virtacore has a long history of providing public and private cloud solutions to meet the needs of clients. The Virtacore service offerings include complete cloud solutions and platforms, disaster recovery solutions as well as Google Apps implementation and integration. Virtacore is based in Sterling, Virginia.

For more information about the SmartCEO VOLTAGE awards visit their website.

Types of Outages and Impact:

When thinking about what might happen, it is important to review the possibilities. How would an outage occur? How long might it last? With that, we at Virtacore think it is critical to consider the impact of the answers to those questions. In a situation like Hurricane Sandy an outage or down time can be related to physical infrastructure problems (flooding or damage to a building) or could be related to power. In the case of flooding or building damage and you can’t enter the building, how would you adjust your infrastructure to keep the business functioning without having access to your data center?

Duration of Outage or Down Time:

Virtacore recommends that you consider adopting a response hierarchy based on the length of time of the expected outage or down time. Working with your organization’s management, you want to come up with lengths of time and what you plan to do at each time interval of the outage. For example if the outage turns out to be eight hours or less, what would you do? Once it exceeds eight hours what do you plan to do? If it will be a week or longer, what is the plan? This helps keep you focused during times of emergency and makes the IT problems less of a concern during a time of crisis.

Resources:

What are the resources needed for business continuity during an outage or down time? Make sure you know what the resources that will be needed, how much it might cost (give or take) and how long it will take to have the resources in place. This can be everything from computers (in the event of building damage) to hosting environments for your key corporate data, to email services. Having a resource utilization plan for business continuity can go a long way during a difficult time.

The trend of moving applications to the cloud (Software as a Service) and infrastructure to the cloud has helped many IT managers and executives by reducing the burden an outage might cause. A cloud or DR solution from Virtacore can go a long way towards making an unplanned outage and down time much easier to handle.

To learn more about Virtacore’s cloud and disaster recovery solutions, contact us today.

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As part of this re-start on Spiceworks, Virtacore will begin featuring a member of the Virtacore technical team on our Spiceworks community page who will provide resources, information and answer questions about virtualization, VMware and the cloud.

We plan to be an active member of the Spiceworks community and look forward to interacting with over 2 million IT Pros in the coming weeks and months. To learn more and join in the conversation, check out Spiceworks today.

“This has been a strong partnership built over several years between our two firms,” said George Naspo, CEO. “We were instrumental in helping them with their adoption of cloud technologies. To have Robert [Hardman] speak about the cloud infrastructure and services we provide their organization is very gratifying. This is a multi-billion dollar global telecommunications company and we have been with them for every phase of their consideration, acceptance and migration to the cloud.”

Virtacore is a leading cloud services provider specializing in virtual infrastructure solutions utilizing VMware. With over 12 years of experience in cloud and internet services, Virtacore has a long history of providing public and private cloud solutions to meet the needs of clients. The Virtacore service offerings include complete cloud solutions and platforms, disaster recovery solutions as well as Google Apps implementation and integration. Virtacore is based in Sterling, Virginia.

Cable & Wireless Communications is a full service, telecommunications businesses. With operations primarily based in the pan-America region, they deliver-world class telecommunication services to consumers, businesses and governments. Cable & Wireless Communications offers mobile, broadband and domestic/international fixed line services in most of their markets, as well as pay TV, data centre and hosting, carrier and managed service solutions. They are the market leader in the majority of markets in which they operate and services they provide.

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“Of the new data center space being built in the U.S., service providers accounted for about 13 percent of it, but by 2017 they will be responsible for more than 30 percent of this new space, said Rick Villars, an analyst at IDC.”

Demand for services that can replace what is being done with in-house data centers is going to increase quickly. This trend will make pricing more competitive and the business case to move data center operations to the cloud easier to justify.

“This trend is exactly what is accelerating the evolution of the CIO/CTO role in companies,” said Phill Lawson-Shanks. Who recently posted an article about The Changing Role of the CIO on the Virtacore website.

InfoWorld emphasizes that this trend is happening mostly in small to mid-sized businesses and organizations. Read the full text of the article: It’s twilight for small in-house data centers.

“This is an opportunity for us to meet face to face with our customers and talk about the challenges facing their organizations,” said Michael Grant, Vice President of Sales at Virtacore. “It is a time for busy IT leaders to think strategically and have important conversations about the issues that they deal with on a daily basis.” Virtacore will be attending the event from April 14 to April 16. To arrange a time to meet with Virtacore in Florida, contact us.

For more information about the event, visit the Midmarket CIO Forum website.

In 2011 Colin Bannister, CTO of CA Technologies, first posed the idea in a Cloud Vision Blog post (See the full text here.) that the CIO needed to transition to become a “broker” of IT services. In the two years since his blog entry, with the accelerated growth of cloud infrastructure and cloud hosting service providers along with the explosion of all things cloud, I have found his concepts and ideas to be even more relevant today than they were in 2011.

I suggest that this transition for the CIO from “Manager” to “Broker” is a critical step in the evolution of how technology services are being adopted and will continue to evolve. In 2011 Bannister said:

“Now, with IT able to expand out to the cloud, CIOs no longer need to purchase new servers or redo their networks. Besides the cost savings, it also means that IT can move away from tactical tasks and focus on innovative work, like creating new services and designing quality assurance around those services.”

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers are quickly flooding the market with price competitive offerings that are already changing the server landscape in the technology hardware market. It is not inconceivable to imagine that in as little as a few years, the idea of buying a new “server” will seem completely out-dated. We are witnessing a fundamental change in how hardware and software and being delivered to the market. Business Application & Platforms delivered on Technology as a Service.

As Bannister predicts, the best CIOs will be those who begin to think of themselves as resource brokers and act more as a consultants, or trusted technology advisors, and less as managers of IT infrastructure. The future of business is about being flexible, nimble, efficient and responsive to changes in the marketplace. The CIO needs to be a big part of that approach. Over the past 20 years we have witnessed radical changes in technology and in the past five, with the explosion of mobile computing and on-line resources, we have seen an even greater impact technology has on business operations. The CIO as a broker is one who understands how the technology trends and resources can be assembled to form a solution that best serves the needs of his/her organization.

My recommendation to CIOs is that you begin thinking like a consultant and find ways to improve the overall service delivery IT provides to your organization. That, coupled with becoming an efficient broker of IT resources, will improve your, and your organization’s, ability to meet and successfully address the challenges of the future. Much like an entrepreneur is seeking ways to serve his/her clients, the most successful CIOs will be those who can act like a consultant/broker and skillfully motivate and encourage his/her team to adopt a very similar approach. If not, they run the risk of being left behind.

Phill Lawson-Shanks is CTO of Virtacore, a leading cloud services provider specializing in virtual infrastructure solutions utilizing VMware.