Any company that can provide Internet access in some of the most remote areas of the world — think Death Valley and Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., Mount Cook in New Zealand and The Great Barrier Reef in Australia — must have a robust technology platform. Global Gossip, the Australia-based managed services provider, specializes in the delivery of network and communication solutions. The company manages and maintains over 300 networks with service locations spanning eleven countries, including Australia, United Kingdom and the U.S. Since moving to Verizon's cloud in 2011, the company has made huge savings and has more than 10,000 concurrent users at any given time.
Verizon's Nil Pritam sat down with Rob White, infrastructure and systems manager at Global Gossip, to discuss how moving to the cloud has translated into business efficiency and savings.
At what point did Global Gossip realize that it needed to make the transition to the cloud?
Firstly, the warranty was up on our existing hardware and we were faced with the prospect of purchasing new infrastructure. Add to that the new software licenses we needed and we were looking at a large cash outlay, which we couldn't justify. The speed at which our business was growing in Australia and Europe was another factor. In all, it made sense to think about moving into the cloud.
Talk about your journey to the cloud. What were your chief concerns?
It was a huge learning curve for us. For example, we are required to be PCI DSS compliant, so we had to look for a provider [with compliant infrastructure]. In terms of concerns, obviously our business relies on being available to our customers, so our biggest concern was to maintain uptime.
What stakeholder buy-in did you need?
Cost was obviously a big factor, with co-location costs in Sydney being so expensive. So, we needed to justify [the cost] with senior management and especially with our finance folks.
How has your cloud journey evolved since 2011?
We started with Verizon's Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) and we've since made the step up to using Verizon's cloud infrastructure, where we host our customer facing websites, web tools, databases and servers. When Verizon demonstrated its cloud solution, it was a much more attractive offering. The web interface offered us more visibility and more control. Once we had successfully migrated from CaaS to Verizon cloud we then began moving apps from our legacy data centers too.
Talk to us about the cost savings?
Just on the hardware alone, there were huge savings. The fact that we didn't have to worry about server and network maintenance was great too. We [also saved costs], as the number of man hours we had to spend maintaining infrastructure decreased significantly. We didn't need any software licenses, as we could just go through Verizon. Our hosted data center was expensive — particularly the Internet bandwidth. But the Internet bandwidth in Verizon's cloud was a very attractive proposition for us.
How has the IT landscape evolved for you in the last 10 years? What's different?
Cloud computing has changed the landscape for the industry, especially for us. About five years ago, it was primarily about virtualization, but now with application programming interfaces (APIs) design, our developers can get apps onboard in a much timelier manner. Even the role of the IT manager has changed. No more simply looking after servers and network infrastructure. Now my team concentrates on customer-focused innovation instead.
Visit Global Gossip's new website, running on Verizon's cloud infrastructure or visit Verizon Enterprise Solutions for more details on how the cloud can help your business.
