SMEs to the private cloud to win the competitive advantage

Devlinks Co., Ltd. is an automation manufacturer located in Chicago with extensive automation products and localized data centers. The growing company, with 15 employees and countless contract salespeople, is trying to remain competitive in the robotic manufacturing market, mainly by expanding its ithttp://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13748.html " > Infrastructure without adding too much new overhead.

As a business without cloud computing, Robert Devlin, CEO and founder of the company, said it needed a way for engineers and salespeople to log in to a central server environment and access files, apply and share data. With no prepared cloud infrastructure, the Devlin team of engineers must decide whether to put their data in a public cloud or build a private cloud.

There are three factors in determining which cloud model is best: infrastructure control, agility, and implementation costs. Although the company is developing, its growth rate does not guarantee the purchase of cloud-based servers and transfer to a monthly payment model.

"People who work in different countries need to access the sales process and the engineering process," Devlin said, "I can restrict access and set file access permissions, allowing users to enter the environment on demand." ”

For smaller organizations, it may be a good business case to move to the public cloud model, but companies that know their growth potential should consider private clouds. By moving to a private cloud, devlinks can control the granularity of its environment because the cloud is at the local data center level. After some firewalls have been changed, the new Group Policy object (GPO) and some routes are configured, and Devlinks has a private cloud environment with perfect functionality. can also expand capacity on demand.

Devlin that simply adding data center components has changed the way devlinks business is done. "We are able to access our environment and save emails and engineers in this area of time." ”

The successful use of the new environment is largely due to end-user involvement. Devlinks has never used a cloud, so end users need additional training and a new understanding of the process. However, all the engineers who have access to the environment have already seen the benefits.

"We work with a lot of people across the country," said Scott Jackson, a robotic integrator for the company, "and we could have three or more people working on the same file." There must be a way to log in to the environment so that we can work and produce on the same file. ”

Engineers and salespeople no longer have to email or wait for a phone call when they need to access files. Instead, they can log on to the central portal, access the desktop, and view the required files.

For smaller companies, server hardware and network investment are minimized, but the benefits are enormous. Devlinks plans to extend its private cloud by adding servers in the near future, and may be transferred to the managed application infrastructure.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)