Converged Technology Group IDs Five Steps to Help CIOs Prepare Now for the Global Intercloud

ISLANDIA, N.Y., Aug. 27, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco's global Intercloud announcement in March created a huge stir in the IT industry, but what does it mean in practical terms to CIOs planning today for the business outcomes they want tomorrow?  While the full picture of how the Intercloud will be used is still developing, experts anticipate initial migrations to the Intercloud will focus on two key areas: disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) and the need for on-demand "elastic" compute capacity.  To help corporate IT pros map their strategies to take full advantage of the Intercloud when it's ready, Converged Technology Group (www.convergedtechgroup.com), an award-winning Managed Services Partner (MSP) serving clients throughout the Northeast, has identified five critical steps CIOs can take to prepare their organizations for the coming global Intercloud today.

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"Cisco's Intercloud holds great promise, particularly when it comes to reducing customers' IT costs and mitigating risk, but it's important to prepare today for the architectures and options that will exist tomorrow," says Leo E. Galletta, President and CEO, Converged Technology Group.  "A solution provider experienced in developing cloud strategies can walk corporate CIOs through the phases of integrating their existing technology infrastructure with the global Intercloud. This starts by defining their cloud strategy, helping them select a private cloud architecture that will support their use of the Intercloud, examining which aspects of the Intercloud will be most effective for their particular business, mapping their migration path over the next one to three years, and finally helping the CIO determine how they'll manage their hybrid cloud operations."

Five Steps in Preparing for the Global Intercloud
Moving to the global Intercloud is a complex undertaking that requires a strategic plan to be developed and enacted in advance in order to reap the significant cost savings and operational rewards made possible as the world collectively defines how this new and innovative hybrid cloud will be used.

1. Define the Strategy: Private, public or hybrid? The days of aligning with a singular cloud strategy are gone.  As businesses mature in their use of technology – and the cloud in particular – most will adopt a hybrid cloud strategy.  To prepare, it's critical to clearly define the kinds of workloads your company is willing to move into the cloud, and to plan IT strategies and technology purchases accordingly.
2. Choose the Architecture:  Not all companies have a virtual infrastructure solidly in place, so the next step is to make decisions about the networking, compute, storage and hypervisor technologies you'll use to get there.  You need a private cloud architecture that will support your extension into the global Intercloud when the time comes, and for IT pros wrestling with the myriad of options, a solution provider or trusted IT consultant with considerable cloud experience may prove to be an invaluable resource.
3. Examine the Economics: There are important features of a global Intercloud – things like bidirectional workload migrations – that could prove to be hugely cost effective.  Yet, it's important to proceed with caution; while taking advantage of the global Intercloud sounds great, is it more cost-effective in your unique business situation than, for example, building out disaster recovery capabilities with a colocation provider?  Cost reduction and risk mitigation will be the deciding factors in terms of how and when tapping the Intercloud makes both business and financial sense.
4. Map your Migration: Whatever technology you're running your mission-critical workloads on today will be your legacy equipment in 12 to 36 months.  Developing a phased migration strategy now that takes into account how your organization can best use a hybrid cloud tomorrow will allow you to maximize the benefits of on-demand capacity, DR/BC, and delivering a single point of management for both physical and virtual workloads.
5. Support it Operationally: The daily operation of this kind of complex hybrid cloud solution requires a host of management tools and trained personnel who can keep business-critical systems operating optimally and securely.  When developing a hybrid cloud strategy – whether or not that includes the Intercloud – examine the kinds of managed services offerings that can reduce the burden on internal IT staff.

More Information:

• Explore Converged Technology Group's private, public and hybrid cloud solutions here: http://ow.ly/Ay2Jr.
• Read about Converged Technology Group's relationship with Cisco and other top IT manufacturers: http://ow.ly/uqxxK.
• Find out how managed services like Assist360 can reduce the burden on internal IT teams while ensuring reliability and accessibility to mission-critical systems: http://ow.ly/urpZz.

About Converged Technology Group
Converged Technology Group is an award-winning Managed Services Partner (MSP) focused on improving IT performance and business outcomes while lowering the cost of technology support for businesses in healthcare, financial services, education, retail, legal and other cutting-edge industries. Located in Islandia, NY, and New York City, Converged Technology Group provides network infrastructure, unified communications, virtualized data center, cloud solutions and managed services to multinational enterprises. The company provides business-critical uptime all the time, and helps clients design, implement and operate their IT infrastructure, communication and computing systems for the greatest return on their IT investments. For more information on Converged Technology Group, please contact us at 631-468-5728 or [email protected], and visit our website at www.convergedtechgroup.com.

Media Contacts:

Anthony Malley
Director Business Development & Marketing
Converged Technology Group
631-468-5728
[email protected]

Lisa Hazen
Account Manager
Communication Strategy Group
631-239-6335
[email protected] 

SOURCE Converged Technology Group