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Vermont Law School had always prioritized data protection and IT resiliency. However, due to competing IT initiatives and a limited budget, implementing a Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) project was challenging. The school had previously deployed an off-the-shelf solution for offsite backups, but it proved to be unreliable. The urgency to implement a secure and reliable DRaaS solution was heightened when the school suffered a costly malware attack that disabled most of their IT infrastructure for over two days. This incident disrupted the business and highlighted the need for a robust DR solution.

Jurlique, a global skincare company, was facing challenges with managing backups at its remote offices and datacenter. The company was looking for a solution that could provide a consolidated view of its cloud and storage of VMs, workloads, and files. The company also required a solution that could support its operations in various regions around the world, including Asia, the U.S., and the U.K. Furthermore, Jurlique wanted a flexible pricing model to manage a configurable, collective pool of servers to adapt to fluctuating workloads.

FreeState Electric Cooperative was facing several challenges. They needed to reduce cost and resource requirements, and were looking for a simple cloud-based replication solution. They also required a flexible and scalable infrastructure to provide reliable and continuous service to their customers. Their legacy applications were running virtually, but running well below their latency requirements. They conducted research to find the right partner, which meant looking at numerous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions including AWS and Azure. They focused their efforts on VMware partners since they operated in a VMware environment. Cost and resource savings were crucial to the company’s success.

Sound Community Bank was facing a challenge with their on-premises backup systems as their data was growing and the systems were in need of a hardware refresh. The bank was running out of space and time. The bank decided that a cloud backup solution was the most agile way to solve their problem. However, finding a service that would meet and exceed the stringent federal finance regulations concerning data security and privacy was a challenge. The bank was already a Veeam customer and they explored their list of top partners, hoping to find an easy, compatible cloud solution that would address their needs of compliance, agility and cost effectiveness.

STP Investment Services, a company providing scalable, transparent, middle and back office solutions to investment managers, funds, and plan sponsors, was in need of an enterprise solution that could scale infinitely. They required a secure cloud for real-time monitoring and critical real-time replication. High performance and scalability were crucial for their success. They did not want critical hardware at their building and needed to scale quickly as the business needs grew over time. They also needed a trustworthy, secure and compliant cloud partner.

Wavex, a London-based managed services provider, wanted to focus on IT strategy for its customers, rather than IT infrastructure. The company needed to ensure the highest availability levels to keep its customers' IT up and running. It also required cost-effective cloud services for its small to medium business (SMB) customer base. Wavex's customer base spans many industry sectors, including finance, real estate, and professional services, but they have had particular success in the legal sector. One of their customers, B P Collins LLP, a Thames-Valley based solicitors’ practice, needed to deploy a critical new business app in a very short time frame and migrate to a new platform that offered high availability SLAs and was low risk to the business.

The Wilson Center, a top-ranked regional studies think tank, was in need of a secure and cost-effective disaster recovery solution. The center's data is sensitive in nature and its location in the nation's capital necessitated a robust solution to protect against outside attacks. The IT department, led by Chief Technology Officer Bruce Griffith, is lean and required a low-maintenance solution. The center had previously had a bad experience with a disaster recovery solution that failed to deliver reliable data replication. The new solution needed to be flexible, reliable, and cost-effective, with the ability to protect every user's information and ensure accessibility for both daily use and emergency failovers.

Quikteks, a New Jersey-based IT consultancy, was in need of offsite backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions for their midmarket customers. The company, which manages the systems of a growing customer base, prioritizes service quality. Being based in New York, they are acutely aware of the impacts of system outages on business operations. The most recent weather event to impact the tri-state area was Hurricane Sandy, and since then, the Quikteks team has been adamant about building resilient disaster recovery and backup plans for their clients. The challenge, however, was finding a solution that matched their exacting standards for service quality and reliability.

Portland Diabetes and Endocrinology Center (PDEC) had been storing countless medical records of patient data, as well as business systems, across two locations. They were doing regular backups using their on-premises Veeam solution, and sending them to their secondary location for safekeeping. However, a disk corruption at the secondary location resulted in the loss of 1.5 days of data. This incident highlighted the need for a more secure and reliable off-site backup solution that could provide geographic diversity at a low cost.

Muhlenkamp & Company, a family-owned and operated business specializing in personalized investment management, needed a reliable, cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solution that could meet aggressive Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). They had a limited IT budget and a lean IT team, which necessitated a cost-effective and easy-to-manage solution. The company also needed to comply with industry regulations such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). After a failed attempt with another DR vendor, they sought a new solution that could provide reliability, visibility, and ease of testing.

The Trans Group, a transportation company, was facing challenges with their data backup solution. They had data housed in multiple locations, but there was no regional diversity, which was not a satisfactory disaster recovery strategy for the long term. The company needed on-demand access to real-time data, such as route information, to provide optimal service to the communities they serve. It was imperative that data was available on demand so that update calls could be made to schools and parents in a timely manner. However, their limited IT resources required an easy-to-use, cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

St. James Insurance Group, a pioneer in the insurance space, was facing skyrocketing IT costs, the need to protect its growing data and systems, and the ability to scale easily as needed. The company had initially deployed disaster recovery in the cloud to protect its own business and was looking to further minimize costs and create business agility by expanding its use of cloud to resource-heavy, production applications. However, finding a provider that shared their vision was a challenge.

The American Board of Urology (ABU) was given a four-week notice by its incumbent web hosting provider to move its entire website. The transition was complicated due to the use of a complex Oracle database stored on the old web server. The IT Coordinator at ABU, Charlie Hall, was the only IT person and was relatively new to the job. He was also scheduled to be away on vacation during one of the final four weeks. The situation was further complicated by the fact that he was not particularly familiar with the website.

Prolateral Consulting, a UK-based company providing hosted IT services, was experiencing rapid growth. This growth led to an increase in costs, particularly for purchasing more hardware. The company had racks of equipment in co-location sites in the UK and Germany. However, as the company grew, it needed additional sites in Europe and the USA, which meant the capital cost of equipment, maintenance, and local support services would all increase drastically. The company was reaching its capacity as a co-location and had to add expensive hardware. This, coupled with the poor state of both the UK and global economies in 2010, resulted in cost reduction becoming a priority for the company.

Superior Credit Union, a not-for-profit, member-owned financial cooperative serving individuals, families, and businesses across western Ohio, was facing a series of challenges. The credit union's data growth was outpacing its backup infrastructure, and its aging legacy hardware was in need of a refresh. The cost in time and money to manage backup and disaster recovery (DR) internally was becoming a burden. Furthermore, the credit union needed secure and reliable access to data. As the credit union's growth continued to trace a steep, upward trajectory, the rapid growth of the credit union’s production environment would soon surpass the capacity of its backup environment, requiring additional hardware in order to keep pace.

Rivermark Community Credit Union was facing several challenges. The growth of data was outpacing their current infrastructure, and the cost in time and money to manage backup and disaster recovery (DR) internally was becoming a burden. They needed secure and reliable access to data, and they had to meet strict industry regulations and standards. The lack of geographic diversity among their data centers was also a concern. They were looking for a trusted partner who could help them address these issues.

EXP, a SaaS provider, was experiencing growth and needed a sound IT strategy to handle it. The company began investigating whether a move to the cloud would satisfy its needs both technically and economically. Initially, most customers wanted their data local; hosted software was less common. However, a majority of customers were actively looking for cost savings and wanted their IT teams to focus on their core business and the operations that support them. This began driving customers to select a hosted model. The change in customers’ preference meant the company needed to grow its datacenter to meet escalating business demands. Historically the datacenter was hosted at a third-party site, but the company’s team operated it. EXP, like its customers, sought the best growth strategy, which resulted in lower costs and minimal impact to the company’s IT team. It looked at hosted public cloud providers to determine whether its needs might be satisfied technically and economically.

Delta Diversified Enterprises, Inc., a privately-owned electrical contractor, was facing challenges with the availability and security of their data. The company's EVP and CFO, Brad Berry, was concerned about the potential for their servers to go down in the event of a break-in, fire, or tornado. He was also burdened with the responsibility of managing much of the company's IT operations, which was becoming increasingly demanding due to IT advances and growing workplace demands. Berry realized that he needed to seek an outside vendor to update and refresh the company's technology infrastructure.

Cementos Progreso, a Guatemala-based company, recognized the need for a disaster recovery solution outside its earthquake-prone country to ensure operations would continue uninterrupted in the event of a natural disaster. The company was concerned that a suitable solution would require a significant investment in equipment, infrastructure, and support. The firm already had a colocation site within Guatemala but realized that for true resilience, the company needed to implement disaster recovery provision outside the country to avoid losing access to the twelve critical business applications, including SAP, the business relies on.

Streetline, a leading company providing parking intelligence software and services, was facing challenges with its first-generation software that was written to run on VMs in enterprise data centers. As the company grew, it started to add services on the cloud and recognized the potential of containerization and Kubernetes as their future platform. However, due to preferences from their customers for their data to be physically segregated from the public cloud, Streetline did not select a hosted offering from a cloud vendor. The team examined CoreOS, Rancher, and other methods to run Kubernetes distributions. They decided to run their own distribution of Kubernetes. Once Kubernetes was deployed and the operations fairly well automated, the focus turned to ways to minimize operational overhead while deploying a variety of stateful workloads including Redis, MySQL, Elasticsearch, and GitLab.

Volkswagen Group, the world’s second largest automaker, was facing a challenge with its IT environment which had become decentralized and heterogonous due to its recent growth. Brands, divisions, and advanced initiatives operate on different IT platforms which requires costly investment in hundreds of technologies and development tools. The company's heterogeneous IT platforms included specialized hardware, often with long procurement cycles, and required significant manual work to provision new resources. Furthermore, expensive storage solutions were being consumed by applications that doubled in their capacity requirements every two years. The company needed to unify and automate work streams and platforms across the entire Volkswagen Group. New standardized infrastructure would need to replace existing developer systems yet still connect to legacy applications that maintain important data.

The operator, a leading telecommunications company based in Japan, was looking to offer Kubernetes to enterprise customers interested in running cloud-native applications. They wanted to deploy Kubernetes as part of a hybrid environment that would give clients the flexibility of accessing VMs, containers or baremetal instances as needed. The operator was also interested in creating internal business applications with microservices and needed to provide containers to internal development teams. One of the benefits they saw in Kubernetes was the ability to reduce hypervisor overhead by running containers on baremetal. The operator was using legacy VMware based virtualization infrastructure, which required not only significant hypervisor resources, but also a lot of effort to operate and troubleshoot, not to mention downtime from periodic version upgrades.

The Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), China's second-largest exchange, was experiencing rapid growth, processing millions of trades each day for its 1700 listed companies. However, the existing IT systems were not meeting the computational needs of fund managers. Traditional client-server technology began to fall short of performance requirements and lacked the flexibility to accommodate fast-moving industry developments. To thrive, fund managers needed new systems that were scalable, centralized, and not locked into specific vendors or architectures. The new systems also needed to be high-performing, elastic, open, and secure to meet the stringent regulations of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC).

Telstra, a leading telecommunications and technology company, was facing challenges in dynamically allocating bandwidth to efficiently provide the exact network resources required by every user at any given time. This was critical to minimize latency in applications with large volumes of fast-moving data and to maintain high end-to-end performance in bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video, gaming and other multimedia. The rapid growth of cloud computing was putting tremendous pressure on the company to ensure reliable, high-performance networking services despite heavier traffic patterns and greater strain on network bandwidth for distributed computing operations. The company's PEN group had historically built out infrastructure that made provisioning a circuit for customers a multiweek process that included manually setting up switches, routers and other equipment. Customers were becoming more savvy and demanded more speed — in tasks ranging from provisioning circuits to allocating bandwidth.

To maintain leadership and sustain enterprise business growth, STC must continuously increase the value offered to customers and improve IT operations. While recent increases of colocation services from five data centers fueled expansion, STC customers still demand new and differentiated services. STC crafted a strategy to market third-party PaaS and SaaS solutions hosted on a comprehensive STC IaaS platform, and began to recruit cloud partners. Pursuing this ecosystem-based strategy, however, required carrier grade availability, performance, scalability, and security while maintaining a cost structure that permits market leading price points.

EMC Corporation, a leader in foundational technologies for data storage, management, protection, and analysis, was facing challenges with its cloud management layer. The company's massively scalable storage service required a powerful management layer to provision, monitor, and manage cloud resources and transactions. However, the initial management layer's manual processes were demanding excessive staff resources due to recent customer growth. The company needed a new cloud management solution that could handle high availability, performance, and scalability. The solution also needed to be easy-to-use and highly secure. In addition, the new management layer would also be the foundation for two additional cloud services: public compute as a service coupled with the object storage service, and private cloud compute resources for EMC’s internal software development staff.

The article does not provide specific details on the challenge or situation.

Global organizations increasingly rely on technology to innovate and beat the competition. Business executives have an insatiable demand for SaaS applications and E-commerce teams depend on big data analytics. Finance and engineering require dynamically scaling systems and sales mandates mobile and secure access. New workloads, however, must integrate with legacy systems. Thus, IT needs solutions to connect old deployments with new ones, public with private, and physical with virtual. Furthermore, these integrations must not lead to a loss of control, such as systems use without IT oversight, which could result in increased security or compliance risk.

ProSiebenSat.1 Group, a leading European TV broadcasting, digital content, and e-commerce company, faced challenges due to its decentralized structure. Each of its more than 20 business units and subsidiaries had a tailored approach to software development and platforms, leading to varied IT environments. This structure, while allowing teams to drive innovation and growth, also resulted in similar IT challenges across the board. Fast-paced markets required rapid and creative content development, and competitive forces yielded cost and data protection pressure. Provisioning of new servers often took days and hindered business agility. Some teams turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to speed up time-to-market, but not all production applications were best suited for the public cloud deployments. Other divisions migrated to VMware-based virtualized server environments, and a few maintained bare metal and legacy compute environments. Emerging development teams leveraged LAMP stacks, node.js, and MongoDB. But with this varied approach, not all teams had adopted the latest IT best practices such as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and breaking IT silos. More recently, data protection risks caught the attention of ProSiebenSat.1 business leaders, most notably those using public cloud services. The company embraced strong data protection policies, but reliance on U.S. cloud providers brought security concerns.

The bank, one of the 20 largest regional banks in the world, was facing new competition from non-traditional banks with flexible infrastructure and agile development. Despite recent IT systems centralization of all regional subsidiaries onto a single platform, and reliability improvements, the bank’s leaders called for faster application development and innovation. Each application required a unique development and testing environment, making the bank’s infrastructure complex and diverse. The bank’s engineers had to wait days or weeks for new systems to be provisioned, during which time, provisioning visibility remained low. Once deployed, engineers and IT had poor visibility of platform utilization. These inefficiencies drove new server purchases to 500 units per year, constraining other IT investment. The bank needed a new environment to minimize the time and effort it took to build platforms, ideally with self-service and visibility for developers.