How we helped a cloud provider grow and develop

We were approached by a major global cloud service provider offering its clients access to public cloud spaces based on the solutions from the market-leading virtualization vendor VMware. Global companies account for around 90% of the operator’s clients, with 80% having multiple points of presents across the globe and using at least two public clouds.

The majority of the clients comprising global corporations employ the following approach to using clouds:

• a public cloud is leased from two or more cloud providers to ensure continuous access to the company’s web application across multiple markets, regardless of a potential failure on the part of the cloud provider;
• a private or hybrid cloud serves to develop and test new versions of the web application and ensure privacy of sensitive data within the corporation.

As a warranted industrial standard, this approach is subject to a few restrictions, namely:

• every cloud management panel is provided with an individual Service License Agreement (SLA); should there be an issue or failure, an individual approach is taken when dealing with every cloud and service;
• services rendered by different providers can rarely be integrated for convenient monitoring and management purposes, thus oftentimes causing to seek—and then set up—similar products in providers' ecosystems;
• there are no native data migration tools or interprovider infrastructures; hence the expansion requirement of the DevOps staff;
• required network connectivity between cloud providers and private infrastructure;
• more technical specialists are required to ensure the security of integrated infrastructures.