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The evolution of data center trends from virtualization & DevOps to higher scalability through microservices architecture, and to remote management capabilities implicates the inevitability of software-defined data centers (SDDC). The businesses with aspirations of a competitive future can’t afford to linger on legacy hardware-defined data centers in a world of software-defined everything, as it reduces their lift in more ways than one. A one-stop-shop for businesses that are looking for cloud solutions is United Private Cloud, which brings in almost two decades of building and delivering very high-performance software-defined enterprise-grade private clouds IaaS globally. The company’s broad spectrum of managed services coupled with years of experience in the technology industry enables enterprises to modernize their infrastructure and improve their responsiveness, resource utilization, scalability, and agility, resulting in better customer experience and faster time to market. CIO Insider got in a conversation with the CEO of United Private Cloud, Abhijit Phanse, who takes us through the company’s latest endeavors in the hybrid cloud realm and the different approaches to software-defined infrastructure to the customers.
In conversation with Abhijit Phanse, CEO, United Private Cloud
United Private Cloud has decades of experience in the industry. How do you perceive the latest developments in the private cloud solutions market?
Cloud is becoming the de facto choice of IT infrastructure for organizations across the world, with the market manifesting a year-on-year growth of more than 20 percent. The multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions, which can interoperate seamlessly and combine together to deliver a cohesive solution, are increasingly becoming the need of the hour.
With the growing security consciousness among organizations coupled with the rising need for data compliance, democratizing data sovereignty, along with the drastic consequences of the data leak and robust security-consciousness, the cloud infrastructure with high resilience has become a strong investment area for organizations across the globe. The reliability, flexibility, and assurance of the highest uptime augment the driving factors.
United Private Cloud comes with all the benefits of cloud computing but with the greater controls and security of an enterprise-grade private cloud. Powered by VMware technologies, it comes with a guaranteed 30 percent lower cost than the leading public clouds. Our fully-managed and secure cloud services for your private, public, or hybrid cloud configurations are designed to build and manage your enterprise-grade private cloud infrastructure. It provides high performance, enterprise-grade security, and on-demand scalability to serve your unique enterprise needs. The customers are provided with an audit-ready risk analysis and compliance management service to ensure compliance with industry-leading governance standards.
Cloud computing is a dynamic technology and is evolving rapidly, posing significant challenges for organizations. How does your strong experience help them to tackle these challenges?
Deploying and maintaining a cloud infrastructure is becoming highly complex and sophisticated with every passing day. It’s not only that most companies don’t possess the expertise to either manage or navigate through the dynamically evolving technologies and security protocols, but also they can’t afford the luxury of trial-and-error. They need to get it right the first time, as the mistakes could be catastrophic enough to bring the business down. This makes it imperative for them to leverage the experience and expertise of third-party solution experts like us - to make the right choices, deploy the right solution, scale it, and secure it within a limited time, budget, and high quality.
Owing thanks to almost two decades of strong wisdom, we have built an extremely sophisticated enterprise-grade private cloud infrastructure that boasts unparalleled quality propositions. In fact, we are in the third generation (G3) of private cloud deployments, as our first, second, and third generations of private cloud were deployed 15 years, eight, and two & a half years ago, respectively. It is precisely why we are well-known as the global experts in software-defined private cloud and hybrid cloud management solutions. We are positioned to attract a plethora of
bluechip companies to leverage our expertise and wisdom. In addition, many of the globally leading system integrators, in fact, use the United Private Cloud solution as their underlying private cloud infrastructure.
On the other hand, it’s also imperative for organizations to optimize cloud solutions’ potential by integrating them with other connected infrastructures. Over the last 15 years, we have applied a significant focus on building our hybrid cloud management capabilities, which today pays off in an exemplary manner. We have built UnityOneCloud, our SaaS Multicloud Management Platform for managing real-world hybrid cloud environments like data center cabinets, power distribution units, bare-metal servers, networking devices, containers pods, mesh services, and serverless, across multiple data centers, private clouds (VMware, Hyper-V, and OpenStack), and public clouds (AWS, GCP, and Azure). UnityOneCloud has played an instrumental role in positioning us as a global leader across multifarious verticals like IT, BFSI, Retail, Logistics, Oil & Gas, Media, TMT, Government, and many more.
Seamless migration is a key aspect of ensuring business success. What’s United Private Cloud’s standard operating procedure to enable its clients a seamless migration?
Cloud migration is an extremely time and cost-sensitive business. There is no room for a ‘goaround.’ Thus, recognizing clients’ sophisticated requirements, interpreting them flawlessly, and getting it right the first time is a significant part of our value proposition. We commence our consultative approach by comprehending the current infrastructure and deciphering our clients’ business goals, compliance requirements, pain points, and customers’ requirements with the present and future prospects. Having a grasp of these vital details plays a significant role in providing them with a consistent and compatible platform with their existing infrastructure. Our G3 private cloud consists of everything from VMware, Hyper-V, and OpenStack, in addition to offering Oracle as well as SAP specialized solutions, Silicon, Edge, Kubernetes, Compliance, Hybrid Cloud Management, PBaaS (Private Cloud Build as a Service), among others. Our managed services include infrastructure and database management, container and mesh management, managed security, managed compliance, cloud assessment and migration, multicloud management, SDDC design and implementation, DevOps automation, data center, and cloud assessment. This broad spectrum of capabilities enables us to navigate our clients to the ideal solution that is tailor-made for them, is compatible with their existing infrastructure, and in turn, makes the migration hassle-free as they don’t have to refactor their underlying infrastructure.
We are in the third generation (g3) of private cloud deployments, as our first, second, and third generations of private cloud were deployed 15 years, eight, and two & a half years ago, respectively
While this takes a significant wedge of the pain away, we ascertain a completely seamless migration experience by breaking the process down into three phases – the pre-migration planning, execution, and testing phases. But unlike the standard practice in the industry, our commitment doesn’t end there. With our systematic account management paradigm, we perform continuous operational tuning and weekly follow-up with them to ensure that they optimize and use the solution’s full potential. With us, it’s a consultative approach and a continuous process of serving our customers better.
Furthermore, private clouds are often considered as much more expensive than public clouds. We have broken that paradigm as well. Over the years, we have arduously focused on making our enterprise-grade solutions cost-effective, which is why we are able to deliver such empowering value propositions which include high-performance guarantee, multilayer redundancy, exceptional resilience, high scalability, and 99.999 percent uptime (Google’s guarantee is 99.95 percent), a simpler contracting & billing model, and much more, at a fair price. To put it into perspective, if you compare us with the largest global public cloud vendors, we are 30-40 percent more cost-effective than them.
The pandemic has unfortunately unfolded an unprecedented set of challenges that test every organization the world over. What are the new trends in the making, and how has your response been?
One of the many things the pandemic has taught organizations is how reliant they are on technology, be it enabling a remote work environment or serving clients through the digital medium. Most importantly, they have realized the
fact that the new normal is here to stay, even after people start going back to the office. Hence, the technology industry is driven by the need to make the companies’ overall IT infrastructure more robust and maintain a seamless Work-From-Home environment.
The pandemic being a tailwind, the companies are fast-tracking their plans to migrate from their traditional data centers. The scalability, quality, and the resilience of solutions they are looking for has also progressively transformed for good. The acceleration of the migration process is also driving the demand in terms of building a robust cloud infrastructure. We tick all the boxes and have experienced dramatic growth over the past four-to-five months.
On the flip side, the companies are desperate to ensure that their workforce savors the best work-environment. We provide them with a compelling solution that couples both enterprises and employees, using a robust digital channel. Our end-to-end solution includes a high-performance desktop with centralized management called UnitedDaaS, with all their enterprise applications built-in so that the enterprise data remains secure.
Our remote management solution encrusting the entire multicloud, UnityOneCloud, has seen a lot of adoption across different industries. The rationale is no rocket science. The customers entail the ability to do everything they could do with their data center, ranging from virtualizing, monitoring, auditing, and managing remotely. That’s precisely what UnityOneCloud is all about.
If I ask you about one of your recent deployment stories, which one immediately comes to your mind?
One of our customers is a large edtech company, and their journey is quite interesting. They initially had their own legacy data center infrastructure. We started our relationship with them through an agreement to manage the equipment that they moved to our facility. They soon migrated to our private cloud infrastructure, followed by their need for public cloud infrastructure. Hence, we eventually provided them with a state-of-the-art hybrid cloud using the G3 PrivateCloud and UnityOneCloud solutions, which ultimately enabled them automation and upgraded their skills. Their customers are spread across a large spectrum, including private and public sector customers, requiring enterprise-grade security and availability. In turn, their data has diverse attributes like high compliance requirements and generic nature with respect to different projects. We expanded their footprint and provided a G3 private cloud solution that comes pre-built with highly secure and scalable services to ensure the security of its government and other high-security customer workloads. We checked all the boxes for them, and it was a challenging, successful journey over the last ten years!
“Our unityonecloud solution assesses their old data center, automatically maps it into the target footprint, and provides them with devops, automation, high scalability, and remote management capabilities”
The technology around the cloud and other connected systems is undergoing dynamic evolutions. Going into the future, what are some of the technology integrations that your company is planning for?
There is an increasingly strong demand for Edge Computing. With 5G around the corner and heavy investments in the telecom sector, it’s going to be a key driver of the industry in the near future. Along with the core cloud infrastructures, the need to minimize the latency by bringing the cloud capabilities to the Edge will also grow. Hence, we are also deploying many Edge solutions, and going forward, that's an essential aspect of our constant innovation and business growth. We have built a solution, an Edge Data Center, which can deploy our G3 private cloud as a customized point-of-presence (PoP) for a customer at any location preferred by them.
While we go forward with the growing demand for Edge Computing, managing it together with public clouds, private clouds, and data centers is becoming a soaring challenge. But we already have our phenomenal solution United Private Cloud, which addresses these needs for the real-world hybrid cloud management. Hence, that’s another aspect of our expansion plans.
On the other hand, customers want to modernize their data centers constantly. They either want to get out of their old legacy data centers and move into a whole new software-defined data center, move into a private cloud or public cloud infrastructure or want a combination of all these three options. Again, our UnityOneCloud solution assesses their old data center, automatically maps it into the target footprint, and provides them with DevOps, automation, high scalability, and remote management capabilities. The whole data center modernization and migration is another area with many opportunities and where we have our focus spot on with increasing demand from our customers.
