Many companies are at least thinking about putting more business data and/or applications on Amazon Web Services—and Amazon is doing all it can to help in that effort. But moving data and applications from internal services to infrastructure run by a third party (Amazon or Microsoft or Google (GOOG)) remains tricky, and that difficulty opens up opportunities for service providers like Cloud Technology Partners and for Rackspace (RAX).
So the two companies are teaming up to help customers make the move. Boston-based CTP provides consultation and migration services.
Its experts look at what applications a company runs, the types of data, and recommend a plan of action for which apps should go where and how to accomplish that most efficiently.
San Antonio-based Rackspace is a cloud pioneer, having helped build the OpenStack technology that now runs many companies’ private clouds. Rackspace offers its own public cloud services where customers rent shared computing, storage, and networking resources from a single provider. That can help customers save on building more of their own data centers. But in the past year, in a nod to market realities, Rackspace is also helping customers run their work on Amazon (AMZN) or Microsoft Azure (MSFT) public clouds.
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In this latest partnership, Rackspace will act as what is called a managed service provider, to assume the role of the customer’s IT department. An MSP manages the customer’s work in AWS, or some other cloud or clouds.
The use of public cloud gives companies flexibility to add and delete computing or other resources as needed and pay for them only when they’re in use, but the sheer complexity of options in AWS can make that management tricky. If you turn on a computing job and then forget to turn it off, then you lose a lot of that agility, for example.
Amazon Cloud Partners Face Tricky Proposition
However, as previous partners have found, providing ancillary services to the ever-morphing Amazon cloud can be a tough gig. Amazon adds more features and functions weekly and it’s clear that, in its bid to win more big business customers, it will keep adding tools to make management easier for non-techies. That means it will compete more with those partners.
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