CHR Builds the Fast Lane to Cloud Computing
The CHR Cloud Apps and Services offerings include:
- Hosted Exchange
- Hosted Sharepoint
- Hosted Servers
- Web Hosting
- Backup Solutions
The very nature of the cloud, though, makes the service offerings and their concomitant revenue opportunities limited only by the imagination. After touring CHR's NOC and data center, James Taylor nearly ran out of ink while illuminating all of the possible points for monetization along a cloud-enabled path.
Safest Cloud in the Sky
As we have discussed throughout this issue, there are numerous cloud offerings in the marketplace, but not all clouds are the same.
Public clouds have cost benefits, but performance can vary wildly. "When a provider leverages a public cloud to host their application, they have no way of knowing what other applications are being run in that shared environment," said Fredel Thomas. "The risk is when someone else's application becomes so heavily used by users that it affects the performance of your application because of the shared infrastructure."
These risks are enough for many businesses to shy away from the cloud. This is where the CHR private cloud solution comes into play. "At CHR, we actually eliminate this risk by offering a private cloud backed with detailed service level agreements (SLAs) not only on the infrastructure side, but on the access side as well," continued Thomas. "Meaning, a client's applications are supported end-to-end regardless of what other applications are running in CHR's cloud environment. This level of SLA is critical so that our clients never have to worry about the performance of their apps being affected by other apps being hosted in our cloud."
When I visited their NOC in Houston, I also learned that CHR also employs advanced, proactive monitoring of their cloud environment to detect and address any issues that could affect performance levels before they impact the environment.
Let's Get Physical
As everyone working in IT knows, virtual security only goes so far. How good is encrypted authentication and redundancy if the power goes out by natural or manmade disaster? When I visited CHR's facilities in Houston, I was impressed by the level of physical security and disaster recovery. Every possible scenario had been given considerable thought. From an infrastructure perspective, everything was redundant—from the back-up power to the HVAC. Even the location of CHR's critical facilities within their building makes it the least likely to sustain damage in the event of a hurricane.
