Cloud Experts Deliver Real Business Value
jengates
If you’re familiar with Rackspace, you probably know how proud we are to deliver what we call Fanatical Support. For us, and for our customers, Fanatical Support is so much more than marketing puffery. It’s the obsessive commitment to service at the heart of our culture.
But it’s also more than just a mindset. Concretely, Fanatical Support means our customers gain access to experts versed in the world’s leading clouds and technologies to help them handle the critical aspects of infrastructure management, including:
- Architecture
- Security
- Migrations
- Operations
Let’s take a closer look at how Rackspace experts help customers with each of these key areas every day.
Architecture design
Whether you’re deploying in the cloud, on-premises or both, designing an architecture to meet your application requirements is never a one-time activity. It’s a continuous, ongoing process. As your business grows and technology advances, users’ needs and expectations shift; and with cloud providers constantly evolving their platforms, it’s important to continually re-architect to best take advantage of new features and services.
Choosing to take on the architecture design work internally means you need to invest significant time and money in finding, hiring and retaining certified architects.
What Rackspace delivers:
When you partner with Rackspace, our specialists work with you to design an architecture specific to your application needs. Here’s an example of the infrastructure design steps we might take:
- Our team of certified experts review your application infrastructure and gather your specific requirements.
- We build your architecture based on detailed diagrams, cost models and best-practice templates created according to your needs.
- We update your architecture on an ongoing basis as your requirements evolve and as new features and cloud services become available.
Because Rackspace offers services across a broad range of technologies and deployment models — including dedicated hosting, private cloud platforms like OpenStack and leading public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — you can feel confident that our recommended architectures accommodate the best-fit technologies for your business.
The combination of choice and expertise means we can deliver an architecture designed to meet your application’s specific performance, availability and scalability requirements while eliminating the need for you to retain costly architects in-house. For instance, for use cases requiring extremely high availability — as with our Critical Application Services offering for our portfolio of ecommerce and content management applications — we’re confident in backing up our architectures with a 100% uptime guarantee.
Real customer outcomes:
Architecture optimized to support holiday web traffic.
“Rackspace really helped us design the right infrastructure to support the ecommerce business and digital experience we were trying to create. With the scale ability and burst ability that Rackspace provides, we can support holidays like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, or Father’s Day, as well as new product launches, with very little notice.”
– Sara Kenton, Director of Digital, YETI Coolers
https://youtu.be/gTjQykGlS5s
Hybrid cloud architecture designed to maximize security and performance.
“Solution experts designed and deployed an architecture that delivered a seamless integration between our back office databases, business applications, finance and stock management systems hosted in a dedicated environment. Our front line website and ecommerce trading arm were hosted in the public cloud for optimized scalability and cost efficiency.”
– Charles Bikhazi, Head of Applications Services, Help for Heroes
Security
Ensuring your application portfolio is safe, secure and stable is vital to minimizing risk and maximizing business outcomes. In a world where it takes an average of 205 days for a company to detect a security breach, that’s easier said than done.
If you choose to manage your cloud security in-house, you’re accountable for managing that risk; and the burden is on you to locate and retain highly sought-after security experts to run operations 24x7, monitor activity and manage patches and unforeseen fixes.
What Rackspace delivers:
Fanatical Support means that in addition to secure infrastructure, you also gain access to the guidance and on-demand expertise you need to help keep your environments remain secure and stable.
Whatever your infrastructure choice and security requirements, we have the specialists required on-hand to help you architect and operate it securely — whether you need to ensure configuration best practices and frequent security patching, you need help meeting stringent compliance requirements like PCI or HIPAA, or you need access to our Customer Security Operations Center to combat Advanced Persistent Threats 24x7x365
Real customer outcomes:
Monitoring and threat management services help ensure PCI compliance at lower cost.
“You can’t cut corners with security and Rackspace makes that so much easier. Being PCI Level certified is highly important for PayLease…The monitoring and alerting provided by the NetSec team at Rackspace, along with their threat management services, have been invaluable to us.”
– Wade Williams, CTO, PayLease
Migration
Migrations can often be highly complex — especially when moving business-critical applications or entire portfolios to the cloud — and when things go wrong, it can significantly disrupt day-to-day operations. Common issues include extended application downtime and identity management issues, among others.
As such, migrations involve a lot of risk — and, at least for IT, a lot of stress. Handling them often means hiring and retaining experts for a one-time event who may not contribute to your core mission once the job is done; conversely, hiring a traditional managed service provider to handle your migration as a one-time activity may leave your business with an unclear path forward as your needs evolve.
What Rackspace delivers:
Whether you’re taking advantage of a free email migration to Office 365, moving an app to AWS or enlisting our Professional Services team to move your entire portfolio, Rackspace is uniquely positioned to reduce both the business risk and the stress of migrations.
Our specialists have unique experience helping many different customers with varying requirements. We’ve helped thousands of companies, big and small, execute successful migrations. We have experts across a wide spectrum of technologies. Our position as the leader of managed hosting and our experience building and operating the world’s largest OpenStack cloud make us uniquely suited to move applications from on-premise hardware to your public cloud of choice.
The migration process differs from service to service. Generally speaking, though, we examine your current workloads, server types and configurations, network topology, security, governance and compliance requirements. Then, after we’ve architected a solution to meet your needs, we move your applications and data. Then we typically perform post-migration validation and go go live. Throughout the whole process, a migration manager and team of experts is only a chat, email or phone call away.
Real customer outcomes:
Rackspace Migration Services worked with goHenry, a Business-to-Consumer subscription service, to move their application from a single server to a multi-server private cloud architecture on a tight, fixed timeline:
“When I first met goHenry, they already had the migration dates in mind,” says William Crane, project manager of UK Advisory Services at Rackspace. “They really needed that plan as to how to get to this date that we've already set and agreed to.”
https://youtu.be/Il2ledFgIfQ
Rackspace planned the migration and executed the event over a weekend, meeting the customer’s deadline without any issues for them or to their end users. The result? Lower risk of business disruption and a smooth transition to their new platform.
“What we found was when we’re migrating there was constant communication between our teams,” says goHenry's Product and Ecommerce Director Dean Brauer. “Everything was well planned, well thought-out.”
Operations
Having experts to manage the ongoing day to day operations of your infrastructure allows you to stay focused on your core business. You need certified specialists on-call to monitor performance, make continual improvements and react to unforeseen interruptions.
What Rackspace delivers:
Managing day-to-day infrastructure and cloud operations is at the heart of Fanatical Support. Our certified experts leverage their experience to handle the time-consuming tasks of day-to-day infrastructure operations — from reacting immediately to unforeseen circumstances, vetting new features and creating custom tools to manage your infrastructure most efficiently — so your IT staff and developers can focus on tasks that create the most differentiation for your business.
Real customer outcomes:
Proactive best-practice recommendations ensure readiness for future growth.
“One thing that’s been really helpful with our explosive growth as a company is having a partner that can look at our growth trajectory and make proactive recommendations, tell us the configurations we need to be thinking about the changes we’ll want to make to our infrastructure to support the traffic and transaction volumes we’re seeing.”
– Sara Kenton, Director of Digital, YETI Coolers
Rackspace specialists provide services and guidance at all hours to support critical events.
"It's not uncommon for my account manager and lead tech at Rackspace, and others on my team, to stay up all night with us during maintenances. And our lead tech takes our business so personally, he's probably more frustrated than we are if things go wrong."
– Brian McManus, Senior DIrector of Technology, Under Armour
Access to scarce AWS expertise enables turnkey cloud access and lowers operations burden.
“Leveraging someone at Rackspace who knew AWS allowed us then to turn the key and really start running in that environment…We are more confident there day-to-day, and we aren’t wasting hours on basic administration.”
– Steve Freudenthaler, Systems Operations Manager at Q4 Inc.
Expertise + Fanatical Support = less complexity, lower risk
From ongoing architecture design to complex migrations to cybersecurity to daily infrastructure operations, experts in action means you don’t have to navigate the fast-moving world of cloud and IT infrastructure alone.
Here at Rackspace, we have thousands of cloud engineers on staff with hundreds of certifications in technologies like Microsoft, AWS, Cisco, Red Hat and VMWare — all passionate about fulfilling the Rackspace mission to be one of the world’s leading service companies. That means that whatever your infrastructure mix, you can rest easy knowing your business is in good hands.