15 BUSINESS BRIEFING including MSPs that use the multi-tenancy Cloudian platform to provide storage-as-aservice to their customers. “People want something that looks and smells like cloud, with a consumption payment model, so they’re not buying CapEx; they’re looking for something that’s elastic, meaning that if their workload is growing the hardware is put in before they even need it, and without having to place a separate order. And then having the option to have everything managed so that it feels like a true cloud experience, except that it’s got that data sovereignty.” Complementary solution Cloudian also has a key strategic partnership with Amazon, offering a complementary solution for customers that require a hybrid solution, for example where there is a data sovereignty issue or where connectivity to the cloud might be unreliable, weak, or with high latency. “The further you are from the core, the more shakey and the more expensive that link becomes. A supermarket chain might have a couple of Cloudian storage nodes in every store for local data processing. They cannot count on storage in the cloud because it’s too far away, the latency is too high. We have clients that like the Amazon ecosystem, or they have applications that work in the Amazon ecosystem, but they need the storage to be some place they can control. In the UK, for example, Public Health England stores all health records on Cloudian. In the US, the National Institute of Health does the same kind of thing. We also have a bunch of defence/ military clients and a lot of banks. Credit card companies are doing real time transaction authorisation with massive systems that are running on our data. It’s not easy to do these things in a shared cloud and give the same assurances of latency and privacy. “Wherever people are looking for anything hybrid or to take data out of the cloud, it is better for their data to move to Cloudian because we are fully complementary to the cloud and can easily move that data back into the cloud in the future. Amazon has edge solutions like Amazon Outposts that connect to Cloudian storage. In fact, we’re listed on the Amazon Marketplace so the Amazon salesperson will get comped whether they’re selling data in AWS S3 or on Cloudian.” As examples of how Cloudian is supporting Amazon’s own AI and hybrid edge initiatives and integrating with AI workflows, Tso cites a trio of recent launches, including: n Cloudian S3 Bucket Migrator, which enables businesses to migrate data from Cloudian S3 storage into and out of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new rapid access service for frequently accessed and latency-sensitive applications; n Open source contributions to the S3 connector for the PyTorch suite of tools favoured by AI engineers, which enable deep learning and machine learning libraries to pull data directly out of a Cloudian S3 object store instead of having to move large volumes of data to a parallel file system; and n Integration with Mountpoint for Amazon S3, an open source file client created by Amazon that enables customers to mount a Cloudian S3 bucket on their compute instance and access it as a local file system. Huge opportunity In light of these developments, it’s not surprising that Gerard Brophy describes the opportunity ahead with Cloudian in the UK and EMEA as ‘huge’. For the last three years, Climb (and Spinnakar) have been leading with Cloudian’s capabilities in ransomware protection, backup, disaster recovery and immutability, drawing on its alliances with companies like Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik to offer customers end-to-end solutions. This is still a successful approach, and a good opportunity for resellers/MSPs to ‘land and expand’ with Cloudian. However, in the future Brophy sees great value in leading with discussions around a customer’s data strategy and AI strategy, which he believes plays to the strengths of Cloudian’s hybrid cloud offering and Climb’s broad ecosystem of products. “Gone are the days when you would walk into a reseller and try to sell them another product. Today, we are more interested in finding out about a reseller’s data approach and AI strategy. From that, we can build up a story and then push the products in our ecosystem that align with that story. That’s the way we’re going to sell – it’s solutions-led and it’s a consultative approach, not do you want to buy that product?”He says that Climb can also help resellers move to the managed services model that the market is crying out for. “From a channel point of view, that’s certainly where we see the growth. To see where the opportunity for the channel is, you just have to look at the lack of skills out there. It’s no surprise that everyone is turning into MSPs. Apart from anything else, you’re going to get a much higher valuation of your business selling an ARR subscription model.” Climb can help partners manage this transition through education, through the provision of its own marketplace (Expedition) and by working with the right partners, including vendors like Cloudian, which, as Tso points out, has a large number of MSP partners. “We have over 800 customers worldwide, and that includes over 250 managed service providers, ranging from big ones like NTT, serving thousands or hundreds of thousands of enterprises, to smaller ones with just a few people. That is how we capture the long tail of companies that don’t have the knowhow to go into cloud on their own or to buy something and manage it on their own.” He adds that unlike some storage products Cloudian is inherently ‘service provider-friendly’. “Because we built our ‘as a service’ offering initially for NTT, which provides services to the whole world, we have all these security features for billing and privacy control. Everything is turnkey, all the features are already there, so it’s a very easy sell for us and very good fit for MSPs.” To find out more about Climb and Cloudian, please visit www.climbcs.com/ uk/vendors/cloudian or call 01364 655 200. Mike Tso For CIOs to say they are ‘cloud-first’ now sounds very old hat. Today it’s about right-clouding – what’s right to put in the cloud
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