Philippe Miltin – Executive VP – Computing Solutions
Nowadays, Cloud computing is often called as the ‘third wave’ of business computing, following the era of mainframes in the 1970s and distributed computing in the 1980s and 90s. These earlier technological revolutions owed their success, first and foremost, to the fact that they perfectly addressed the challenges of their time: mainframes coincided with the emergence of the big multinationals against a backdrop of economic crisis, which drastically required an efficient business management, while client-server architectures came to prominence when there was a profound shift towards rationalizing and optimizing processes right through to the end user. Today we’re on the threshold of a new era; the age of speed and agility. The best-performing companies will no longer just be the best managed ones, or the most efficient; they will also be the fastest, the most responsive and the most innovative. And Cloud computing is the best form of information technology provision to suit that situation, which is why it is so successful.
The Cloud market has initially grown up around high-profile, PaaS and SaaS public Cloud offerings, which has led to a certain level of resistance from IT Departments. By equating ‘the Cloud’ with these public Cloud offerings they have, quite rightly, raised questions about security and control over such remote, virtualized information systems environments. But, even though the Public cloud can provide an extremely convenient and cost-effective solution for non-core or temporary requirements, or those originating from the web, it does not seem destined to host businesses’ most sensitive critical applications or data. It seems likely that, above all, the Cloud will act as a general resource for organizing information systems – from infrastructure resources or applications delivered in the form of on-demand services, billed on a pay-as-you-go basis – and that the choice of how it is implemented will be a secondary one. From the web Cloud, we are gradually shifting towards a more mature shape of Cloud, which Bull calls the ‘enterprise Cloud’.
The enterprise Cloud is a hybrid configuration, which draws on various Cloud modes (private, private managed, public and scientific) depending on how critical the applications involved are to the organization, the critical value of data, available skills and resources, the internal culture and user expectations. It is a holistic approach that enables all IT provision to be integrated, secured and orchestrated. So the enterprise Cloud is a made-to-measure and secure Cloud, fully aligned with the organization’s strategic challenges and operational constraints which, by the way, reminds us that the real driving force behind the transition to the cloud is business issues, not technical ones.
To help its customers grasp the real opportunities offered by the enterprise Cloud and support them through this fundamental transformation – not just the IT Department but also, focused around its IT tools, the whole enterprise – Bull has created Le cloud by Bull. This is a well thought-out, integrated approach that mobilizes the full range of Bull’s expertise to accompany its customers as they move, at their own pace, towards an enterprise Cloud that suits them perfectly: responding to their specific needs, now and in the future, and protecting their investments. Le cloud by Bull covers the entire Cloud value chain, to provide step-by-step, cohesive support. This includes everything from upfront analysis (to determine which components of the information system can be ‘cloudized’), to the definition of the services catalogue and target architecture and the implementation of key technological building blocks (such as bullion cloud platform, Bull’s all-in-one cloud server), to security policies and solutions (including Evidian I&AM9, visibull and TrustWay encryptors), and the hosting of managed Private clouds in Bull’s own Cloud centers and the provision of specialist public and scientific Cloud services.
With over two decades’ experience in the design, implementation, security and operation of sensitive centralized systems, Bull offers the best skills when it comes to designing and delivering IT architectures to support enterprise Cloud solutions, no matter which technologies are used. With Le cloud by Bull, the Group is providing an innovative continuum of technologies and services dedicated to the Cloud and its very particular challenges. A comprehensive, customer-centered approach, Le cloud by Bull enables businesses to make a start on their journey to the Cloud, right now, and rapidly reap the initial benefits without losing control of their organization or their information systems.
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