LinkSource helps you understand your options for cloud service providers— getting you the right strategy for your cloud needs.
The cloud is about business outcomes.
In 2006, the first major public cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), hit the market. Now two other major platforms, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, have joined the hyper-scale cloud services world. The business drivers and benefits of cloud computing are categorized into three core service models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). What’s in your cloud future?
Our cloud services will help you achieve:
- Reduced IT costs
- Scalability
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- Business flexibility and agility
- Security
- An efficient mobile workforce
Any of the above benefits would be enough to convince many companies to move their business into the cloud. But when you add them all up, it becomes an overwhelming competitive necessity.
Despite the widespread adoption and popularity of cloud computing, many companies who want to make the move or have made attempts, still struggle with the development and execution of their overall cloud strategy and cloud adoption roadmap.
Cloud services include:
- Cloud Connect/SD-WAN
- Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)
- Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
- Disaster Recovery as a Service (DraaS)
- Data Center and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Email Services – O365, Hosted/Ded Exchange
- Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
LinkSource guides businesses to find the areas of adoption that make the most sense at the right time.
Here are some of the services and strategies we recommend investigating, as cloud-first business strategies advance:
When planning a public, private or hybrid cloud service deployment, it is critical to consider the underlying network. In fact, few things will limit a client’s internal and external experience with cloud-based services more than a network that is not built or optimized to intelligently transport content and user requests.
LinkSource offers many options to solve the issue of network capacity and efficiency for cloud services through partnerships with the world’s leading network transport and network overlay/SD-WAN providers. Whether an organization needs to connect company headquarters, remote offices, call centers, or data centers to cloud service providers (CSPs), a LinkSource advisor can size and manage the procurement of the appropriate connectivity and software to ensure the network will support the needs of the organization.
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) in its simplest form is a solution to replace traditional premise-based dial-tone phone systems with basic call handling technology, with an IP-based cloud subscription delivery model.
By moving basic call intelligence and the management and maintenance of the system to a cloud subscription model, users are empowered with a myriad of features and functionality never before possible on traditional PBX— without the burden of maintaining expensive equipment. This new IP-based model allows IT staff and administrators to be much more proactive to the needs of their users with cloud-based tools that immediately perform tasks like moves, adds, changes, and disconnects— previously taking weeks or months to fulfill in a legacy environment.
LinkSource works with the industry’s leading UCaaS providers to customize an organization’s telephony solution that will lower cost and build toward further cloud adoption.
While moving to a Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) model is a great step to lower cost and improve internal communication, true customer engagement begins and ends with a sophisticated omnichannel Contact Center. LinkSource partners with the industries’ leading Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers to customize call flows and incorporate multiple touch points like chat, video, social media and email into the customer experience.
With advanced features and on-demand customer details that tightly integrate with popular CRM tools, agents are empowered to greatly enrich the service they provide to the end-user.
In many respects, most cloud-based or Software as a Service (SaaS) procurement models also provide a level of business continuity and disaster recovery. Reputable Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) typically operate from multiple geo-redundant datacenters and can transfer replicated customer data between them at near-real-time, if one should experience downtime. However, this does not complete an Enterprise Disaster Recovery plan.
Today’s cloud service providers specializing in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), offer multiple ways to back up, replicate, and restore data with industry-leading Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). LinkSource helps organizations design a cost-effective, cloud-based disaster recovery strategy with a client’s specific enterprise requirements.
Enterprise clients who want to get out of the data center business (whether it’s a 10,000 square-foot raised floor environment in the basement or a phone closet with a couple of servers) often turn to companies specializing in outsourced data centers to house their critical systems, or simply procure dedicated compute power and storage.
By transferring the responsibility of physical security, network connectivity, environmental needs, and even hardware procurement and maintenance to a reputable third-party data center operator, organizations can significantly lower cost and greatly mitigate risk and security compliance concerns.
LinkSource partners with the world’s leading global data center and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers to develop a strategy and procurement model reducing or removing the need for an internally owned and managed data center.
Managed email is a very common and well-established cloud-based subscription service, and is often one of the first steps an organization takes towards a cloud-first strategy. Today, cloud-based email services are typically implemented in conjunction with multiple popular office-type application subscriptions like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation applications for ease of access and remote use.
LinkSource helps customers make this initial step and partners with the leading software service providers and integrators to manage projects end-to-end.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI, refers to the process of running a user desktop inside a virtual machine that lives on a server in the client’s data center. It’s a powerful form of desktop virtualization because it enables fully personalized desktops for each user with all the security and simplicity of centralized management.
While typically VDI is an “on premise” service, all the same advantages and benefits of a VDI environment are available in cloud-based models from providers specializing in Desktop as a Service (DaaS).
LinkSource works with the industry’s leading DaaS providers and helps build a cost-efficient subscription-based custom user desktop environment.
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