Immedion, Integral Solutions Group, Net3, and Servosity are among the Upstate companies reaching new heights in cloud services
Nearly every business is engaging in some form of cloud computing whether they think of it that way or not. Software as a service (SaaS) like Office 365, Dropbox, or even Gmail is all cloud-based applications. But at some point, your business will get more serious about the cloud — usually when you face the need to invest in infrastructure and the very expensive subsystems to support and maintain it. Then you’ll look to one of the hundreds of providers – from small resellers to large multifaceted full-service providers – here, or the large global providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
Larger providers, like the four we are profiling here, are consistently innovating to support new services and new technologies, and, most importantly, protect the yottabytes of sensitive data their customers place in their control.
Net3 Technology
- Cloud services provider
- Offers Palmetto Virtual Data Center (PVDC), featuring custom-size servers, as well as cloud services including launch assistance, monitoring, management, scaling, and backup.
- n3t.com
Net3 Technology caught the technology wave in May 2009 and rode it to become a significant player in cloud providers in the region.
Hudson Denny, Bryan Rice, and DJ Bissinger self-funded Net 3 because there was little interest during the heart of the recession from venture capitalists and private equity firms to bet on tech startups. Today, Denny describes the firm as “solvent, self-funded, and not answerable to outside entities.”
When Net3 launched, the cloud was “about 20 percent reality and 80 percent smoke and mirrors.”
“We knew we wanted laser-line focus on the cloud, where the cloud was headed, where virtualization technologies were headed, and where this hybrid model was headed. That was the track we started on and have been on ever since,” Denny explains.
Net 3’s premier product is PvDC (Palmetto Virtual Data Center). The company has three data centers where they co-locate: one in Greenville, one in Spartanburg, and one in Las Vegas, where they have gear in the SUPERNAP facility run by Switch. That facility, known as “Fort Knox in the desert,” is the only Tier IV gold-certified data center in the U.S., as rated by the Uptime Institute. That certification recognizes the facility as having met the highest standards for operational sustainability.
Going bicoastal was an important decision for Net 3, and it was driven by customers who “needed us to take it to the next level,” Denny says.
The company has 28 employees and 200 customers, spread out across the U.S. Roughly 70 percent are in the Southeast with 40 percent in the Upstate; another 30 percent are national.
Two things set Net 3 apart from other cloud providers, according to Denny.
First is the front-end portal. That gives clients end-to-end visibility — the “single pane of glass” — via a management console that lets them see all their resources, applications, and status across data centers. Clients can dynamically shift resources, reallocating bandwidth or processing power, or even shifting resources between cloud providers. “If they’ve got an IT staff that is savvy enough to do it, they can run the entire experience from the portal. If they don’t, we are here for them,” Denny explains.
And that’s the second differentiator: “white-glove service.” Large public cloud companies like Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure cannot provide the personalized approach to every business. “It’s not that they don’t care about you,” he says. “They just can’t scale to that level.” But Net 3 does, providing a “consultative approach” that includes a conversant relationship with your business so they can advise you on how different technology decisions will affect your business.
Denny, a Georgia native and 1995 Furman graduate, believes much of Net 3’s strength is in the time spent educating and consulting with their clients. Companies move warily into cloud migrations, Denny says. “We typically see it as eating the elephant one bite at a time.” They may start with moving some files, shifting an application, or moving functions from aging equipment to eliminate the need to purchase expensive hardware.
However they begin, Denny can’t remember any customer who hasn’t continued to move more and more services into the cloud — especially once they’ve been hacked or had a failure. One of Denny’s customer stories involves a local software company that lost its entire 150-plus servers. They failed over in a matter of minutes, or as Denny describes it “in the time it would take to get a bio break and get a cup of coffee.”
The company managed the failover themselves from their portal without even involving Net 3. “When the smoke cleared, they decided to migrate everything from disaster recovery to full production,” Denny says.
Immedion
- Data center services and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
- Offers five levels of cloud offerings, colocation, and managed services such as storage, security, backup, and disaster recovery.
- immedion.com
Frank Mobley has spent his entire career in essential industries that demanded perfection every day, every hour.
The founder and CEO of Immedion started in the telephone industry as a computer engineer, and he knows that there is no such thing as a service that never goes down. But understanding that reality doesn’t mean he and his 80-person staff aren’t working to better the odds every day.
Immedion has seven geographically diverse data centers throughout the region and in Cincinnati, where it acquired two data centers in 2015. The company serves a large client list of some 600 customers.
Despite a big footprint and scalable resources, Mobley describes Immedion as “a local company.”
“We differentiate ourselves because we are able to sit across the table and talk about what our customers need to help them develop the right solution,” Mobley says. While technology does enable cloud providers to offer services to clients without regard to geography, Immedion has not jumped into that pool. “It’s tough for a national or international company to have that relationship [with their clients],” he notes.
Although Mobley resists describing a typical client, there are some commonalities, including, somewhat surprisingly, that half of their customers are small businesses with fewer than 20 employees, including many one- or two-person operations.
“We provide a lot of technical support to them,” Mobley says. Often those businesses are small IT shops. “Sometimes, there are very smart IT people who started a business and usually they are good generalists, but they get into something where they need a specialist. And we can help with that.”
Vertically, Immedion’s customer portfolio mirrors the region’s industry footprint: tech firms, professional services firms, manufacturing companies, engineering companies, and health care. “Ten years ago,” Mobley says, “we would have been much heavier on the IT business side.”
Trust is a major factor for cloud providers especially with high-profile, albeit infrequent, failures of global providers like Amazon. “When Amazon struggles,” Mobley says, “it raises the profile of all cloud providers.”
“Some companies come knowing what they need; some have no idea what to do,” Mobley says. Spreading his arms wide, he says, “Often they come and say they need something like this, when they really need something like this.” He contracts to a small circle, fingers touching.
That’s why Immedion puts a lot of effort into its pre-sales engineering process. “We are helping them define solutions and identify what they need in terms of infrastructure or resources.” The scalability of the services is critical because they can start with just what they need and then add “on-demand or just-in-time” services when they need them.
How well does Mobley sleep at night? “The things that keep me up at night are the things out of our control,” he admits. “We are we are getting ready to go into storm season and we watch that very closely. We sweated through Hurricane Matthew last summer from our Charleston site’s perspective.”
Immedion’s data centers have multiple generators and redundancies, employ geographically diverse failover if a region is impacted, and are audited twice a year to ensure they are SOC-2 and SSAE-16 compliant. Those are industry standards that certify companies have established and follow strict security policies and procedures that include security, availability, processing, integrity, and confidentiality.
The company is celebrating its 10th year in business and has never lost a building. Mobley can only point to “a couple” of instances that affected an individual customer.
But the threats in the last few years have increasingly not been from weather or power failures, but malware, ransomware, and other cyberattacks. “We can do everything we can, but we cannot guarantee 100 percent that you won’t be hit,” he says. Hardware and software can do a lot but there are “unknowns,” he says, that are very hard to protect against. The biggest unknown? Authenticated users.
Servosity
- Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery
- Sells mainly to managed IT service providers. Detects disk failure in real time and triggers seamless failover (switching to a redundant backup system).
- servosity.com
Most cloud providers offer a portfolio of services orbiting the central proposition of cloud delivery. But not Servosity.
Rather than broadening its focus as the needs of companies for ever-expanding services has grown, Servosity has stayed focused on one area: disaster recovery and business continuity. Client targeting is another differentiator. Rather than trying to reach a vast audience with diverse needs, Servosity sells primarily to managed IT service providers (MSPs).
Servosity CEO and founder Damien Stevens describes the heart of Servosity as its proprietary software, which includes several components that are currently in patent review.
The software uses operating system policies and programming to detect disk failures in real time and to initiate a failover that occurs seamlessly to the end user. Currently, the software requires action on the part of the MSP (which Servosity calls partners, rather than clients) to “push the button” with total recovery taking potentially 10 minutes, but future development of the software will get that down to “sub one minute on the order of seconds”.
Stevens says his ultimate goal is to make “the world’s servers uncrashable” through what he calls “autonomous self-healing.”
“Uncrashable” really means “impactless” — where server failures would be corrected or ameliorated without human intervention and, potentially, without anyone realizing it had happened.
It’s an “if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest” proposition. But it appeals to their partners, which Stevens says number in the “hundreds” across the U.S. and the world.
The average service provider client is a company with 10–50 employees. Servosity itself has 12 employees, who are engineers, software developers, and client support specialists. It also has two data centers — one in South Carolina, one in North Carolina — as well as multiple cloud partners.
Clients can choose to buy the software only and use it on their own infrastructure; to buy the software and connect it to major cloud providers such as Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure; or to have Servosity manage their cloud either by creating a private cloud on their servers or managing a client’s presence in the public cloud space.
In addition to MSPs, other Servosity clients are data centers themselves who want to use the software to manage their failovers and recovery; and software companies that want to provide DR to their own clients.
What seems absent is sales. In fact, the company does not even have a sales force. Stevens says prospective clients find Servosity on the web, are given a free trial period, and work closely with onboarding specialists. The sales cycle usually takes about 42 days. “It is a high-stakes decision,” Stevens admits. And it demands a high trust factor, especially considering they rarely meet their clients.
The idea of waiting for prospects to call may seem lackadaisical, but it is successful. “Things can always work faster, but we’ve been blessed to grow about 100 percent per year,” Stevens says, adding that 65 percent of prospects who speak with a Servosity staffer will become clients.
Unlike other cloud providers, Servosity has not expanded to offer managed IT functions, and it doesn’t monitor the servers housing data it is charged with protecting. If things go well, they will never even know that a disk error has occurred.
With ransomware and other cybersecurity concerns, more and more businesses are realizing the file backups are insufficient to keep business up and running and looking for cost effective solutions. “Over 80 percent of small to medium businesses don’t have disaster recovery,” Stevens says.
Integral Solutions Group
- Technology and full-service IT provider
- Offers cloud services, managed service, AV and cabling, data center, and IT infrastructure.
- integralsg.com
The cloud wasn’t what Integral Solutions Group in Spartanburg was looking at when they first started operations as a managed IT company in 1987.
But it found many of its customers facing facility issues. When they couldn’t find a good solution to their customers’ reliability and uptime requirements, they decided to build one. “We originally designed the data center as a colocation facility and began offering cloud services for customers that wanted some of those ancillary services like email,” says CEO Joe Strayer. “They wanted someone to give them a per-user price and provide a great service. That’s where we started.”
That was in 2010 and ISG has stayed true to its beginnings by focusing fully on their customers’ portfolio of needs. “We’re really in the high-touch business,” explains Strayer.
IT staff in medium-sized businesses with 50-500 users are “overwhelmed,” he says. “They are pressured on personnel, challenged to innovate with technology to help the business compete better, and … are really pushed on reliability and availability. They don’t have time to invest in the knowledge base to get that done. They look to us to do that for them.”
ISG offers a lot of services that are outside the realm of most cloud providers, such as voice and data support, cabling and AV, and a collaborative meeting space integration service that even includes inviting prospective clients to run live meetings in ISG’s own meeting rooms to try out the audio and video experiences.
“Integral’s play is to handle IT from beginning to end,” Strayer explains. That can include its cabling and infrastructure group working with architects during the design of a building to ensure that support for projectors, smart board, and integrated video conferencing is built in from the ground up.
ISG has one data center in Spartanburg and partnerships that enable it to replicate data to national communication firm Level 3’s servers in Omaha, Neb., and Dallas. Its 600 customers are nationwide and it maintains sales offices in Spartanburg, Greenville, Charleston, and Columbia.
The drive to move to cloud solutions, Strayer believes, is different for small-to-medium businesses and large businesses. For larger businesses, “it’s about realizing an expense cost versus a capital cost.” Breaking down the cost of servers, network gear, applications, and the personnel to manage and support them, a business must ask, “What do I have to do to get 20 seconds of downtime over a year of operation?” Strayer’s answer is to “go to a facility that was specifically designed to do that.”
But for a smaller business, reliability and availability are the key factors. A small firm is more likely to make the move to the cloud because they just can’t afford either the staff or the hardware to maintain the systems their business may depend on.
ISG started a Virtual CIO service 18 months ago. “We look at our clients as partners. We are not trying to compete with IT departments or displace them,” Strayer states. But IT leaders are often so swamped by the operational day-to-day, that they can’t be “true to their mission,” which Strayer defines as “identifying ways to use technology to provide an advantage to the business.” The VCIO works closely with the IT leader to think three to five years out on life-cycle management, budget planning, and the strategic thinking that so often falls to the bottom of the to-do list.
“The VCIO helps us tie our relationship closer together and, more importantly to the customer, helps us get a vision of the business so we can stay ahead of the curve,” explains Strayer.
There are 96 employees, including five data center staff, six staff monitoring the Network Operations Center, and 30 integrators.
“I tell customers the only way to guarantee security is to unplug the internet and keep all your computers away from their computers,” Strayer says. But that doesn’t mean that ISG is throwing their hands up in the air. The company is audited annually for SOC-2 compliance and has had only one exception in nine years. They have third-party companies perform penetration tests (PEN) to attempt to hack into their network and servers.
With all of that, how does Strayer sleep at night? “I sleep well, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the occasional bad dream.”
Huh?
A guide to cloud-speak
It’s a language all its own, geek-speak wrapped up in acronyms and esoterica. Welcome to the cloud, where mostly you’ll never understand what they’re talking about. But there are some terms you really should get familiar with.
aaS: Not what you think. It’s “as a service,” and you can put just about anything in front of it. Infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), software (SaaS), platforms (PaaS), or data centers (DCaaS).
9s: You might see references to “4 9s” or “5 9s” or more. This refers to uptime and availability. What difference does a digit make? Quite a bit. A company promising 99.9 percent (3 9s) is estimating that your services will be down for 8 hours and 45 minutes a year. Sounds pretty good. But with 4 9s uptime, you get services all but 52 minutes a year. A company promising 6 9s is expecting downtime to be 31.6 seconds a year. There’s a calculator for this at uptime.is.
Hybrid, public, or private cloud: The cloud is just another term for the internet. The public cloud refers to services available over the internet for purchase. Think Dropbox, Google Apps, and pretty much everything you use. The private cloud is made up of services you host internally in which, even though they may be publicly available, your company’s data and employee access is private and protected. A hybrid is combination of a public cloud provider (like Amazon) with a private cloud platform. The infrastructure operates independently of each other, but integrate using software and processes to make applications accessible.
VM: Virtual machine. Using virtualization technology, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers can create server emulations. They are software-defined computers with the flexibility to scale up or down as needed.
Bare metal: A real server, not a virtual one.
Scalability or elasticity?: Scalability is the capability of a system or virtual machine to add computing resources on demand. Elasticity is the ability of a system to dynamically adapt to workload requirements of a customer, for example, doubling available resources during peak hours but reducing them at night. Elasticity is more related to cloud applications, where scalability is an infrastructure feature.
Yottabyte: The largest data definition so far. In 2010, a yottabyte of data — approximately 1.2 septillion bytes — would have required a data center the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined at a cost of $100 trillion. Today, however, it would only take enough 200GB micro SDXC cards to fill the Hindenburg zeppelin.
Sources: Tech Republic, Stack Overflow, Gizmodo, and MIT
