Beyond The Role of Reseller and Implementer
In the past 10 years, the evolution of technology has continued to accelerate every year at a dizzying pace. It is now more challenging than ever before for IT leaders to develop and implement technology strategies for their organizations without the help of outside resources.
There are simply too many variables and solution options; and the speed with which technologies change can create confusion, delayed decision making, and, consequently, cause delays for important projects. Utilization of outside resources to assist with implementation has been at the core of services offered by Zunesis for over 12 years. But, during this time, we have also provided many of our customers formal, vendor-neutral Assessment and Strategy Development consulting services.
If you are responsible for managing IT architecture direction for your company, you have far more variables to consider than at any time before. Here are a few of the variables you need to factor into your planning:
Virtualization
- What Hypervisor will you use?
- Will you begin utilizing Converged solutions?
- Will you virtualize all workloads? How will you decide?
Storage
- What type of storage will you deploy? Locally attached, centralized/shared storage using Fibre Channel and iSCSI?
- Will you use All Flash or Hybrid?
- Will you separate storage by workload?
- Will you utilize cloud storage?
- Will you provide storage through Converged or Hyper Converged solutions?
- How will you protect your storage infrastructure?
- How do you ensure a storage infrastructure that will meet performance demands? How will that scale?
Networking
- Will you maintain a physical network infrastructure or begin utilizing some form of software defined networking solution?
- How will you provide security across your network?
Availability
- How will you provide availability for your virtualized infrastructure?
- How will you protect your data?
- Are there SLA’s that need to be met? Are these well-defined? Do you know the RPO/RTO requirements for your organization?
- Do you provide a separate protection strategy for your data and virtual machines?
Cloud
- How does Cloud fit into your strategy?
- What workloads will be appropriate in the cloud?
- How will you migrate workloads to the Cloud?
- Will cloud be part of your disaster recovery strategy?
The questions listed above are very familiar to today’s IT leader. And, in fact, they represent only part of all that needs to be considered when developing your IT infrastructure strategies. These questions, and the path to getting them answered, is also familiar to your technical team at Zunesis. As a Solution Provider and Value Added Reseller for over 12 years, we’ve seen the industry through many transformations. And with Account Managers and Technical personnel having decades of experience, Zunesis has been involved with every aspect of IT Infrastructure design, implementation, and support.
But beyond the technical expertise, Zunesis makes it our mission to be an advocate for our customer, apart from representing the manufacturer and software vendor solutions we sell. It is our level of experience and our Customer First belief that qualifies us to help our clients define their IT strategies, not just act as a reseller and implementer.
While many of the challenges faced by you as an IT leader are common, we know that you have unique requirements when it comes to how we can best help you meet those challenges. Over the years our independent consulting services have taken many forms. Here are just a few of the types of consulting services we have delivered:
- Detailed documentation of existing IT Infrastructure. This documentation is often used to begin the process of evaluating future strategy.
- Performance assessments for storage, networking, and compute. In addition to documentation of the performance data, these assessments include infrastructure documentation and recommendations for improvement if performance problems are identified.
- IT Infrastructure Assessments. These are our most comprehensive offering and help define where you are, where you want to go, and recommendations for getting there. Our assessments include:
- Infrastructure documentation
- Documentation of goals/objectives
- Stakeholder discovery sessions
- Recommendations
- Implementation Roadmaps
- Backup and Disaster Recovery planning
- Request for Proposal and Request for Quote development
- Data Classification Assessments
The services listed above don’t replace the role of an IT leader in an organization, rather, they are designed to help organize the information required for you to make better informed decisions. Bringing in an outside resource, with experience across many technologies, is your way to enhance your own process and help you successfully define and implement your IT strategies.
Denver just got hit with a huge snow storm, and there’s plenty more where that came from this winter. I noticed while slipping and sliding my way to work yesterday that there were very few other cars on the road – unusual for 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. That’s because in today’s world of technology, employees can work just as well from the safety of their homes as they can from the office. When icy roads hit, they can avoid braving the streets and still get just as much done.
However, in order for this to be a viable option, someone has to make sure that remote access is working….
The ability to function at a high level from remote locations has become a need over the past several years. Working offsite has helped countless companies to allow their workers to tend to sick children, evade driving in horrible conditions, or just to take some time away from the office while still getting work done.
As you might imagine, at Zunesis, we spend much of our time working remotely for one reason or another. Therefore, we are experts at providing remote access solutions for our clients. From basic VPN solutions, remote desktop, or VDI solutions, we can make working remotely/remote access work for you. Whether your company has one employee or hundreds, there is a need and a solution for you.
In our always-connected world, working remotely can take many forms: working from a plane, train, or car while en route somewhere, or working from a coffee shop or your home office. It could mean working from the beach, from the ski resort, or from your grandma’s house over a holiday weekend. In addition, BYOD could also become an option at the office.
Being that there are so many options for remote access, listing all of the different options would get boring in a hurry. Instead, we would like to offer a moment to talk about what we can offer to make sure that you’re ready for the next snow storm (or any type of disaster).
Let us:
– Work with your IT department to plan a remote access solution for you. This will include all the documents on how to connect and use your remote access solution. We can even train your staff.
– Health check your existing solution for remote access. If it can’t handle the demand when employees need to work remotely, it won’t help you on bad weather days. Certain companies lost hours of productivity during the last snow storm due to the inability of their remote access systems to handle the extra work load. We can test and verify your existing solutions to make sure they are up to your company’s needs.
– Help prepare you for the next snow day or DR emergency. Under many circumstances, you and your employees will have a pretty good idea of when you will need to be working remotely. There is no need for anyone to have to run into the office to troubleshoot or turn on remote access.
We can help make sure you are prepared and don’t have the same issues you did with the last snow storm. After all, it’s only December, folks. We’ve got a lot of winter left.
Denver just got hit with a huge snow storm, and there’s plenty more where that came from this winter. I noticed while slipping and sliding my way to work yesterday that there were very few other cars on the road – unusual for 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. That’s because in today’s world of technology, employees can work just as well from the safety of their homes as they can from the office. When icy roads hit, they can avoid braving the streets and still get just as much done.
However, in order for this to be a viable option, someone has to make sure that remote access is working….
The ability to function at a high level from remote locations has become a need over the past several years. Working offsite has helped countless companies to allow their workers to tend to sick children, evade driving in horrible conditions, or just to take some time away from the office while still getting work done.
As you might imagine, at Zunesis, we spend much of our time working remotely for one reason or another. Therefore, we are experts at providing remote access solutions for our clients. From basic VPN solutions, remote desktop, or VDI solutions, we can make working remotely/remote access work for you. Whether your company has one employee or hundreds, there is a need and a solution for you.
In our always-connected world, working remotely can take many forms: working from a plane, train, or car while en route somewhere, or working from a coffee shop or your home office. It could mean working from the beach, from the ski resort, or from your grandma’s house over a holiday weekend. In addition, BYOD could also become an option at the office.
Being that there are so many options for remote access, listing all of the different options would get boring in a hurry. Instead, we would like to offer a moment to talk about what we can offer to make sure that you’re ready for the next snow storm (or any type of disaster).
Let us:
– Work with your IT department to plan a remote access solution for you. This will include all the documents on how to connect and use your remote access solution. We can even train your staff.
– Health check your existing solution for remote access. If it can’t handle the demand when employees need to work remotely, it won’t help you on bad weather days. Certain companies lost hours of productivity during the last snow storm due to the inability of their remote access systems to handle the extra work load. We can test and verify your existing solutions to make sure they are up to your company’s needs.
– Help prepare you for the next snow day or DR emergency. Under many circumstances, you and your employees will have a pretty good idea of when you will need to be working remotely. There is no need for anyone to have to run into the office to troubleshoot or turn on remote access.
We can help make sure you are prepared and don’t have the same issues you did with the last snow storm. After all, it’s only December, folks. We’ve got a lot of winter left.
