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What is Operations-as-a-Service?
There are so many “X-as-a-Service” acronyms out there with platform, infrastructure, software and etc. The world hardly needs one more. Consumers have become frustrated with “cloud fatigue” and the industry’s “fountain of youth” search for a “one-size-fits-all” approach to computing. We are poised to take another evolutionary step towards a fully outsourced holistic platform in computing services.
Peak Hosting has identified a massive gap in what current service providers aren’t delivering, but is sorely needed within our industry. Fundamentally, does your company benefit from being an Internet Plumber? Does your company gain any strategic advantage by keeping all of these “Internet Plumbing” skills in-house? Is it just another distraction and drain on system resources?
At Peak Hosting, we believe your company should focus on the things you could never outsource, like developing your intellectual property and your Sales/Marketing programs. Until your company has over 1000 servers, there is no economic incentive to bring Operations in-house. Even then, it only makes sense if it fundamentally improves your ability to execute. We believe that with our Peak Total Operations℠ and our Operations-as-a-Service platform… you’ll never need to take on Operations alone.
What are the cloud and other hosting providers missing?
Besides performance, stability, economic pricing at scale and redundancy, the biggest failing of the cloud is that it doesn’t provide any of the human elements that help you run your operations team. Just because you don’t have to buy servers or storage or run a datacenter, doesn’t mean you don’t need an army of expensive, talented, and (sometimes challenging) staff to cover all of the disciplines that make up a modern operations team.
What’s out there?
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – The original “_aaS” is great when you want to run *their software*. However, what happens when you want it to be your application, code, or your technology? SaaS is only effective when the software provided is perfect for you in every respect, and this is painfully limited.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – The easiest of “_aaS” to provide, this is simply remote compute (i.e. Amazon Web Service, Rackspace). Whether it’s dedicated, shared, cloud, or whatever, this is nothing but raw compute for you to apply your operating system, applications, and etc. to achieve your business goals. The problem with IaaS is that it only solves a small portion of the overall operations workload: It only removes the capex, datacenter, and networking components. The customer still has to provide expertise to recruit, hire, train, and manage:
What are cloud providers missing?
- Architecture and Design
- Fully Dedicated Server Hardware
- Operating System Support
- Application Support
- 24×7 Monitoring, Alerting and Escalation
- System and Network Performance Trend Analysis
- Database Administration and Architecture
- Virtualization Expertise
- Out-of-Band Remote Access
- Bi-Coastal SAS 70 Type II and SSAE 16 Certified Data Centers
- On-Site Hardware Repair with One-Hour SLA
- Security
- The Most Advance Storage Architecture Available
- Off-Site Backup Archiving and Recovery
- A Robust, 10-Gigabite, Fully Monitored Network
- Local and Global Load Balancing
- Application and System Failover and Redundancy
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) – Platform-as-a-Service is incredibly similar to Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The only difference is that PaaS adds either the operating system (i.e. Windows Azure) and/or a well-defined application such as Ruby on Rails (i.e. Heroku). This additional service is of benefit because one skill-set is reduced, not eliminated, from the list of required knowledge. However, it doesn’t come anywhere near close enough to solving your operations problem.
And this leads us to…
Operations-as-a-Service (OaaS) – you can outsource all of the above – IaaS + PaaS – to the best engineers, architects, and support staff on the Internet, outsourcing everything but your code℠. When you do, your company can focus on what sets you apart: your intellectual property, your customers, your sales, and your marketing.
Leave the “Internet Plumbing” to Peak Hosting and our Peak Total Operations℠.
Only Peak Hosting provides enough soup to nuts support – services – to deliver support across all of the disciplines any Internet focused company would need. So, you can confidently rely on our engineers while you do what you do best.
Peak Hosting has lived through the various hype cycles of our industry. While we are always up for automating as much as possible, there is still a need to have subject matter experts to ensure that you get the most out of your infrastructure choices. This is where our PTO sets itself apart from the industry. This is why we deliver Operations as a Service.
Isn’t this just managed hosting?
Not at all. Most “managed hosting” is nothing more than trivial OS or application re-installation via an automated GUI or API. Database administration is entirely excluded, as is any customization of the hardware, configuration, network topology, or infrastructure. Fully managed hosting is a nice start, but in reality it falls far short of Operations-as-a-Service. It fundamentally doesn’t move the customer closer to outsourcing their IT team; it only solves part of the problem.
Managed hosting, when boiled down, is just dedicated hardware with GUI’s and API to automate the most repetitive of human tasks. It doesn’t give the knowledge gap protection of actual staff segmentation to provide companies with skill-sets they don’t posses in-house. Instead it primarily focuses on taking the easiest 15% of the workload of their existing staff and moving it into software.
Peak Total Operations℠ delivers the experts in operating system management, application support, networking, security, database administration, monitoring & alerting, automation tools, performance trend analysis, and virtualization expertise. So, companies can focus on their individual product without needing the specific skill-sets to implement “the plumbing” around their goals.
