Use of Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure and the Google Cloud has grown exponentially since their founding. GNS has great technical knowledge in public cloud management as a complement to our private cloud. As our customers' requirements have grown more complex, GNS has evolved to meet their needs by formulating sophisticated solutions combining the best of private and public cloud implementations.
GNS' hosting platform is well suited for specific application suites, less commonly available operating systems (FreeBSD, Solaris, Illumos, etc.), and for clients that want extra security for their systems.
For clients that wish to make use of public or hybrid cloud platforms to leverage their flexibility, scalability and services, GNS offers a variety of services tailored to the most common issues facing these environments.
One of the primary concerns with the public cloud is security. GNS has certified security specialists on staff that provide best practices in locking down environments for both Azure and AWS. This is vitally important as clients are now needing to access company services from not just from their offices, but remote locations as well. Organizations have found mobile computing to be in high demand these days, and GNS has developed many solutions in both the private and public clouds to help clients deploy and manage these resources.
Many clients have noted that a prominent issue in their past experience with public clouds are the hidden costs involved with their services, such as staff spinning up servers that go unused, data download volumes being much larger than expected, and backup management utilizing far more storage than necessary. Just these elements alone can quickly double the cost of using the public cloud.
GNS has developed a suite of tools that utilize both the Azure and AWS API's to help reduce these costs. For example, we can easily locate all the resources that are in use, ascertain how and if they are being effectively made use of, and then either flag them for removal or shut them down during periods when they are not in use. This activity is conducted in line with the customer's schedule. We work with the customer's technical team to produce a management plan for each item, such as automatically shutting down development systems on weekends when they are not in use, and then restarting them prior to when the work week begins. These tools extend to scheduling and managing of backups as well, including deletion of stale or unused resources.
GNS has extensive experience with connecting Public Cloud environments to different hardware and software firewalls, either on-prem or remote. Please contact us if you're looking for ways this can be accomplished, or we can simply configure these services for you.
BC/DR preparedness should never be ignored, no matter where your infrastructure resides. There are many different options when establishing these measures, and what might seem simple at first, can often take days or weeks to fully implement. At GNS, we have developed many different architectures for BC/DR based on our clients' unique requirements, and we can help your organization implement these processes as well.
GNS has extensive experience with the following AWS and Azure Services: