Richard Blanford explains Fordway's unique approach to being a cloud provider and integrator and how we deliver value for customers.
Any organisation considering moving applications to the cloud will begin with the questions: when is the right time and what services should we move? If you can extend the life of your existing infrastructure while reviewing your options in the medium term, a useful first step is to move your Disaster Recovery (DR) to the cloud.
With the online portal which handles the majority of its consent and regulatory activities becoming increasingly unresponsive, the Oil and Gas Authority needed a new secure hosting environment. After a competitive tender it chose managed cloud provider Fordway, which now hosts the portal and provides back-up and DR using its own equipment in two UK data centres. Fordway also set up and hosts a remote desktop environment to run business-critical applications which could not be supported internally and enables new applications to be added rapidly to meet user demands.
As we continually look for new ways to deliver applications to an increasingly mobile user population, the question is becoming: if solutions can be packaged once for any device, do we still need VDI?
For years, companies have been searching for the holy grail of providing seamless access to business critical systems via a browser. One of the key tenets of a VDI solution is the availability of all applications, anywhere. However, it comes at a significant cost, primarily in terms of the back-end grunt required to provide this capability, but also financially.
Have you been tempted by the falling costs of public cloud services? The big players are improving their offers all the time, and with some also setting up UK data centres to meet forthcoming GDPR requirements, server/instances of a few pounds per month can look like a very good deal. And for many organisations and many services, it is.
