Case Studies National Cloud Solutions Provider Launches Disaster Recovery as a Service with Concurrency’s Assistance

National Cloud Solutions Provider Launches Disaster Recovery as a Service with Concurrency’s Assistance

Overview

Recently we assisted one of the largest communications companies in the U.S. to prepare and deploy a new offering for its customers: Disaster Recovery as a Service.

Among its many offerings, our client is a reseller of Microsoft Azure as part of its own banded services to businesses. Our client wanted to expand its Azure offerings with a focus on Disaster Recovery—but in a way that also established a framework for future offerings via Azure. Given the very large scale of the planned offering, our client wanted to be certain to build the solution right from the beginning.

Solution

That required a deep understanding of the Azure platform, an appropriate governance model for using it, and a wide range of insights into the source systems our client’s own customers would be seeking to build Disaster Recovery around. That is, our client needed in-depth assistance with Azure itself and a myriad of details on how to address its own customers’ various servers, storage limitations, operating systems, and so forth. For the new offering to be successful, our client needed to know what questions to ask its customers as they came onto the system, how to serve those customers on an ongoing basis, how to maximize value from the Azure platform itself, and how to manage the entire model.

At the beginning of the project, a team of Concurrency consultants flew out to the IT team’s center of operations. The Concurrency team included business analysts, Azure technical experts, and system architects. We met with the client’s team to establish goals and project parameters. Then we began with a comprehensive analysis of the current state, including detailed technical processes.

When that research and business analysis was complete, we developed a comprehensive architectural document to establish the framework for the Disaster Recover as a Service offering. Within this document, we covered in very fine detail the costs of running the offering.

Having established the architectural framework, we then turned to in-depth technical implementation. We provided comprehensive guidance on all aspects of using Azure to meet the needs of our client’s end customers. To do so, we leveraged our deep experience working with such companies in our own consulting work with them. These key takeaways proved greatly valuable from both a business and technical perspective as our client prepared a cost-effective, scalable framework to serve business users.

The end result was an extensive technical and operational framework for providing Disaster Recovery as a Service. Our business analysis work helped our client understand options about how to sell and position the service then set up a customer on the platform. As part of our engagement, we helped our client set up and serve an actual customer as a test case.

After these successful design, planning and implementation phases, we then supported our client in the following months as its Azure business expanded to include Disaster Recovery.