Cloud – GDS Africa

The Journey to Reduce Cloud Overspend

While most organizations have some workloads deployed to the cloud, very few have adopted a continuous cost optimization strategy. In fact, the 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Report found that organizations without a cost optimization strategy waste an average of 35% of their monthly cloud spend. Learn how you can recover wasted spend with guidance from GDS every step of the way to help you.

The Road to the Cloud Isn’t Always Clear

Everyone wants to “go to the cloud,” but most lack a cohesive strategy with which all business stakeholders agree. Confusion of cloud benefits, complexities of cloud migrations, and concerns about security, performance, and high availability are a few of the roadblocks that frequently show up on the journey.

A Trusted Partner Along Your Cloud Journey

The experts at GDS Africa combine expertise across data center and private cloud platforms, public cloud, multi-cloud architecture, security, and application modernization. We have developed our Cloud Adoption Lifecycle to align with your journey as you assess applications for the cloud.

We can guide you every step of the way to build a cloud-enabled enterprise foundation that is optimized for cost, high availability, performance, and security while delivering full control and visibility of applications and data running in the cloud.

Strategy

We will help you develop a plan, taking a close look at your business requirements and how you define successful outcomes. In addition, we will review the technical requirements to support these business outcomes, perform an analysis of the applications and all dependencies, and summarize an evaluation of cloud readiness for the applications in scope.

Platforms

Once you’ve set your strategy and have devised a roadmap, we will help you select appropriate platform(s) for your applications (private cloud in your data center, public cloud, and/or other third-party cloud providers). We will also explore multi-cloud considerations.

Execution

Next, we will help you design and implement your solutions. We’ll begin with foundational cloud design and deployment (including networking, security, identity and access management, and all pieces needed to create a solid foundation). Once your cloud landing zone(s) are prepared, we will help you determine how to best migrate your applications, establish orchestration and automation strategies (both within clouds and across platforms), and develop a plan for Day 2 Cloud Operations.

Operations

Once your workloads are running in the cloud, we can assist with ongoing management and optimization. We’ll help you develop strategies to optimize your costs and security posture. We will continuously compare your deployment to the ever-changing best practices from your cloud provider and find opportunities to further modernize your applications. Ongoing education helps ensure your team has the skillsets and tools needed for an effective cloud management strategy.

Putting You on a Path to Cloud Success

Regardless of where you are in your journey to cloud, there are challenges that can slow your migration, increase cost, or even derail your adoption. With expertise across key areas such as cloud assessments, foundational deployments, application modernization, migrations, and ongoing operation and management, GDS Africa can help ensure you meet your business goals and leverage cloud to its fullest potential.

Our service offerings cover the five most critical areas of cloud adoption: education, assessment, automation/orchestration, architect/design/deploy, and ongoing optimization and management.

Assessments

A clear understanding of your cloud compliance needs, estimated cloud costs, and application dependencies is crucial to planning and executing an efficient and timely migration to cloud. Our Multi-Cloud Feasibility and Multi-Cloud Readiness assessments help you gain the critical infrastructure, application, and cost information you need as foundation for your cloud journey.

Automation and Orchestration

As organizations continue to look toward multi-cloud architectures to gain advantages on where and when they move and scale workloads, portability is an absolute requirement. Containerization lends itself perfectly to this by allowing applications to be deployed across private and public clouds (GCP, AWS, Azure) in an automated and standardized fashion. Efforts to test, validate, and release have never been easier.

Our offerings include:

- Trainings: Docker/Kubernetes/Ansible Fundamentals
- Workshops: Automation/Container Explorations
- Customized Design/Build/Deployment Services

Architect/Design/Deploy

To be successful in deploying and adopting cloud services in a multi-cloud paradigm (whether hybrid, cloud DR, or a private/public cloud architecture spanning multiple cloud providers), it is imperative to have a properly-designed public cloud architecture as well as the ability to address security, connectivity, and management from your data center to the public cloud.

GDS Africa architect and design services provide a true multi-cloud architecture. Our team of highly-skilled architects and engineers can provide a scalable, compliant, and secure design—helping you build your multi-cloud infrastructure and automate the deployment of your business applications to that infrastructure.

Optimization and Management

Already in the cloud? We can help you optimize your spend and compliance with our Public Cloud Cost Optimization offering. Keeping cloud-based workloads compliant to your standards and regulatory requirements can be a difficult struggle. Handling bills and tracking spend across multiple cloud providers is an added challenge. Our cloud management platform service provides visibility to spend analytics and forecasts, unified billing, identification of optimization opportunities, compliance checks, and enforcement across all your public cloud providers.

Accelerated Horizon VDI on Azure

Leverage the team at GDS Africa to rapidly deploy a secure, cloud-based virtual desktop solution to minimize disruption to your key business functions in case of disasters, crisis, or any threats to business continuity. Built with VMware Horizon on Azure, this prescriptive offering is designed to rapidly provision access to employees regardless of their location.

Education

Education is often overlooked as a critical path to success for cloud adoption. Familiarity and understanding of concepts, capabilities, and constraints is imperative for all stakeholders and functions within your business to ensure timely and successful adoption and ROI of cloud services. Our trainings and workshops range from foundational understanding of cloud to technical deep dives around orchestration and automation, providing the guidance needed to make sound decisions on your cloud journey.

Our offerings include:

Cloud, Container, and Automation Explorations
AWS/Azure Foundations
SDN/SD-WAN/Containers/Kubernetes/Ansible

Your Cloud, Your Way

When you’re looking to reduce the cost and management overhead of running your own infrastructure, sometimes a highly-customized hosted solution with white-glove support is the perfect fit. With offerings including Cloud Hosted Infrastructure, Cloud Managed Backup, and Cloud Disaster Recovery, GDS Africa can host your mission-critical workloads or protect your current deployments for confident recovery. Hosted in two data centers on enterprise-class technology, our solutions are all built with security and compliance at the core and feature annual Type 2 SOC 2 and HIPAA attestation examinations to satisfy the most stringent of industries.

Cloud Hosted Infrastructure

For applications requiring a customized hosting platform, GDS Africa Cloud Hosted Infrastructure is an ideal solution. We will meet your application, security, networking, and end-user access requirements—no matter how complex. You’ll reduce capital investments in your data center infrastructure by migrating applications and have access to technologies and capabilities currently unavailable in your own data center. Consumption-based cost models are designed to match the cyclical needs of your applications.

White-glove support from the GDS Africa Managed Services team provides full management of the infrastructure, backup, disaster recovery, and security so that you can focus on managing your applications.

Cloud Managed Backup

Backup is frequently the last line of defense against accidental deletions, hardware outages, and malware. Despite this, backup is commonly one of the most neglected and least-discussed components of IT. GDS Africa Cloud Managed Backup is a fully-managed solution, custom-tailored to your business requirements for short-term onsite retention and long-term cloud retention with regularly-scheduled recovery testing to provide you with ease of mind that your data is protected. Monthly consumption-based pricing eliminates the costs of purchasing backup software, ongoing maintenance, and ongoing licensing upgrades as your data grows. GDS provides turnkey management to offload the burden of backup management from your internal IT team through GDS Managed Services.

Cloud Disaster Recovery

When disaster strikes, confidence in your ability to recover your applications and data is critical. Without regular testing, even the best-laid recovery plans can come up short. Our customized disaster recovery approach is architected to your failover requirements to meet Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for your critical applications. You’ll eliminate capital investments in unused equipment at a disaster recovery site while benefiting from a flexible consumption-based cost model that adapts to your changing business needs. Regularly-scheduled DR testing ensures continuous improvement and confidence in your ability to failover in a disaster. With the GDS Managed Services team there to assist with your replication, runbooks, and failover, you can rest easy knowing that you’re prepared if disaster strikes.

Continuous Visibility and Guidance for Operational Excellence

Regardless of cloud maturity, governance and managing cloud spend are top concerns for organizations. Beyond security and cost uncertainties, you may also be facing resource and efficiency constraints that can further hinder efforts—from internal skillset gaps to properly manage workloads and the inability to respond to cyclical business demands.

GDS Africa brings the perfect synergy of Public Cloud and Managed Services expertise. GDS Africa Public Cloud Managed Services allow you to tap into the power of subject matter expertise from GDS Africa-certified resources and ISV partners in hybrid cloud environments to proactively manage critical business outcomes. Our flexible offerings provide 24x7x365 support from multiple Managed Services Centers around the world to enable you along your cloud journey.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Lower and optimize your AWS and Azure spend with data-driven guidance and enhanced visibility, providing continuous operational excellence.

Cloud Security Monitoring

Achieve on-going risk assessment and better understand your risk profiles so you can maintain and strengthen your AWS and Azure security posture.

Cloud Data Protection

Free up your valuable resources and let the experts at GDS Africa manage your data protection needs across your data centers and the cloud.

Expertise to Design, Build, and Manage Your Enterprise Private Cloud

Many organizations are adopting a data-first business strategy as part of digital transformation initiatives, which involves building systems around data placement. Public cloud has constraints on data including latency, data privacy, regulation, and ingest/egress costs. Trends show that moving the cloud experience to the data along with true private cloud controls and enablement provides more value to the business over long-term. GDS Africa brings deep technical knowledge and experience to architect a wide range of infrastructure and private cloud management solutions from the industry’s top manufacturers.

The experts at GDS Africa will help translate your business requirements into an on-premise private cloud solution, featuring solutions such as:

Cloud Data Management
Converged or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Software-Defined Networking
Orchestration and Automation
Comprehensive Software Lifecycle Management
Managed Services
Consumption-Based Cost Models

Building a Customized Roadmap on Your Journey to the Hybrid Cloud

Combining our long history of data center excellence with our dedicated cloud practice, GDS Africa can develop a hybrid cloud solution tailored to your business needs. Whether through pre-packaged or custom architectures, our experts help to build a consistent, secure platform for application delivery in a multi-cloud world.

GDS Africa provides a suite of consulting and advisory services through our talented team of engineers to design, architect, and deploy hybrid cloud solutions on a range of infrastructure platforms and software solutions. Key technology focus areas include:

Cloud Strategy and Migration Services
Hybrid Cloud Platforms (such as VMware Cloud Foundations)
Software-Defined Networking
Hybrid Cloud Mobility
Security
Container Technologies

The Move to Multiple Cloud Platforms

Dependence on multiple cloud platforms is becoming standard for many organizations. Each cloud platform offers a unique set of capabilities and having the ability to leverage multiple platforms is very advantageous for organizations who strive to be as agile and cost effective as possible.

While this approach is very powerful, it doesn’t come without complexity. When considering a multi-cloud architecture, it is critical to have a foundation that serves as the framework for all design, integration, and operational decisions.

A Comprehensive Guide to Multi-Cloud Success

The GDS Africa Multi-Cloud Architecture model addresses the challenges you may be facing to drive success. We can help create the ideal multi-cloud foundation for your specific needs with a focus around the specific outcomes you seek, from performance to cost, reliability, and security.

Performance

How can you ensure that cloud applications and workloads perform as well as, or better than, within the data center? Each cloud platform introduces its own unique performance considerations. The GDS Africa Multi-Cloud Architecture enables maximum performance by carefully analyzing and considering factors such as user location, access methods, geography, and workload profiles.

Cost

How can you manage the costs associated with leveraging cloud? Connectivity and data transfer rates are often the largest factors. The GDS Africa Multi-Cloud Architecture framework provides a way to lower the cost of connectivity and leverage the most effective data transfer methods for each cloud platform.

Reliability

When depending on external connectivity, how can you provide SLAs around the consistency of access to cloud workloads? The GDS Africa Multi-Cloud Architecture provides a reference architecture for connectivity between users, offices, data centers, and cloud platforms to provide the reliability your business requires.

Security

How can you provide consistent security, visibility, and control across multiple cloud platforms? The GDS Africa Multi-Cloud Architecture is a security-first model, enabling your team to fully manage all applications and data, regardless of where they are deployed.

Expertise to Design, Build, and Manage Your Enterprise Private Cloud

The experts at GDS Africa will help translate your business requirements into an on-premise private cloud solution, featuring solutions such as:

Cloud Data Management
Converged or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Software-Defined Networking
Orchestration and Automation
Comprehensive Software Lifecycle Management
Managed Services
Consumption-Based Cost Models

Maximize Public Cloud Capabilities with GDS Africa

To survive and thrive in this era of digital transformation, you need the ability to rapidly adopt new technologies. While Cloud represents an exciting set of possibilities, it also presents a complex journey and set of decisions.

GDS Africa focuses on helping you determine the right place for all your workloads, both for today and in the future. While 85% of organizations use a multi-cloud strategy, the success and security of a deployment can hinge on creating the right multi-cloud foundation.

Whether you’re looking to deploy new workloads in the cloud, move existing workloads to the cloud, or optimize existing cloud workloads, the experts at GDS can help. Focused outcomes include:

Business-aligned cloud strategy
Enterprise cloud foundation
Multi-cloud readiness
Accelerated cloud adoption
Optimized cloud deployments

Amazon Web Services

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Marketplace CPPO Partner, and SPP Resell partner, you can rely on GDS to help build and optimize your AWS foundation..

Microsoft Azure

Accelerate and optimize your Azure foundation with GDS, a Microsoft Gold Partner and Azure CSP Resell partner.

Google Cloud Platform

As a GCP Consulting Partner specializing in the modernization of applications utilizing services from GCP, GDS can help with your GCP initiatives.

Microsoft Office 365

Build the right foundation for your Office 365 deployment with GDS, a Microsoft Partner and Office 365 CSP Resell partner.