Moving from a traditional physical environment to a virtual environment allows for greater flexibility and scalability around the consumption of workload capacity i.e. CPU, RAM, disk, etc. This flexibility allows SaaS providers to consume and deliver the exact quantity of resources for their software applications required by their customers.

 

iland provides many OS and application licensing options on a consumption basis which gives organizations greater flexibility and scalability when it comes to providing software on a SaaS basis. Read more about iland's SaaS cloud.

The benefits around public cloud are tied to its efficient cost model and its scalability. Both of these factors allow iland customers to pass savings, performance and on-demand capacity to their end users.

iland works with you to determine the resources you will need initially but also makes sure that you have the ability to scale up and out by adding additional capacity on demand for new or migrating customers.  iland's cloud platform allows you to move individual customers one at a time as they convert from being on premise to the cloud.

You will have the ability to move templates between your environment and the iland cloud environment and you will be able to spin up and spin down VMs as your workloads dictate. You will also have the ability to customize your OS and applications as necessary.

For customers that have already invested time and money into a local installation of vSphere, customers can leverage a free tool called “vCloud Connector” that will enable the migration of templates between environments and offer basic management from their vSphere client. For those virtualizing for the first time we offer a number of methods for migrating data from your local site to ours including third party and  first party tools that can handle in place conversion or real-time replication to the cloud. Many tools are free to use and offer a variety of conversion time frames with little to no down time.

• Fast-track to market - with the ability to test a variety of environments before a full deployment, SaaS providers reduce the time required for software development and solution deployment in diverse IT environments, streamlining the entire implementation process
• Economies of scale
• Security & compliance – iland SaaS Cloud is HIPAA and ITAR compliant
• Flexibility
  • Network - for an ISV that has peak and valley usage that leads to high bandwidth requirements and substantial hardware allocation for a combination of short and extended periods of time
  • Pricing – options to fit your business and your budget
• Reliability – high availability uptime, SLAs of 99.99%
• Lower total cost of ownership – significantly cheaper than deploying on-premise because a virtual deployment can easily create multiple environments with different operating systems on the same server, saving SaaS providers from having to make a large investment in datacenter space, infrastructure and hardware
• Broad access to connectivity to tier 1 IP Providers
• Disaster recovery
• Scalability - test and deploy services on a ready-to-run virtual machine that includes pre-image templates allowing for quick deployments
• Accessibility – portal access to the system for software and configuration updates
• Resource availability guarantee – iland guarantees that resources will be available for those with a resource pool so your resources won't just stop if you use all your resources
• Enterprise class, high performance storage
• High-computing power for fast processing

iland manages the infrastructure layer only which means customers have full access to their OS and applications to customize as they see fit.

For customers using iland's cloud, time is spent only on the creation and deployment of templates and workloads.  iland completely manages the underlying hypervisor and hardware layer allowing you to focus on your core business needs.  In fact, many companies create multiple virtual datacenters (vDCs) so they can segregate application development, testing, training and demos, and production.  This allows the company to track expenditure by department, project, or team and streamline operations through role based access control and self-service.  

For customers that have already invested time and money into a local installation of vSphere, customers can leverage a free tool called “vCloud Connector” that enables the migration of templates between environments and basic management from their vSphere client.

The transition from ISV to Service Provider creates additional responsibilities with regards to safeguarding customer data and as such your prospects will expect third party validation of your hosting facility.  Traditionally this meant a Service Provider providing proof of an external SAS70 audit of the processes and controls associated with the datacenter.  More recently however, many auditors are following a new certification process called SSAE 16, which, like the SAS70 certification before it, evolved from the British ISO standards.  All of these certifications will be essential in satisfying your customers' due diligence process, and in some cases, they may ask to review the audit report or even schedule an independent audit themselves.  Make sure your cloud provider can provide you with these details and cooperate with such audits if necessary.

Certain industries also require compliance with specific regulations which means you may need certifications in order for you to supply SaaS to organizations that operate within them.  For example, a SaaS provider that provides software to healthcare institutions has to comply with HIPAA regulations because those institutions are dealing with patient information.  You will need to determine whether the industry you are providing SaaS to requires regulatory compliance.

As an IaaS provider, iland provides its services from SSAE 16 and ISO 27001 certified facilities and is certified to provide IaaS to a number of different industries.  We deliver HIPAA compliant cloud services and sign the Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for our Healthcare SaaS providers. iland also delivers qualified cloud infrastructure for Bio and Life Science ISVs who deliver validated applications according to GxP and ITAR compliant services for our SaaS providers who serve the U.S. Defense industry.

iland pioneered solutions for data replication and business continuity to a true VMware-based cloud environment. The most important objective of your business continuity plan is to ensure that business-critical data and processes are secured, and that unplanned downtime is minimized. This means being
able to restore your IT infrastructure, data availability, operational processes, and business processes quickly and completely.

Small and medium size SaaS companies can realistically take advantage of lower bandwidth costs to implement their own cloud-based DR.  iland offers SAN-based, agent-based, host-based and native VMware DR options that support various Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). Whatever the size of your budget, there is a DR plan available from iland. And because your DR plan will be in a public cloud, iland offers dedicated VLANs, dedicated network equipment, dedicated volumes for storage, and encryption of data both in transit and at rest.

Our enterprise storage is simple yet brilliant – presented as a single storage tier, but on the back-end consisting of many high performance storage tiers. Our storage is intelligent and continuously monitors and dynamically moves workloads among different storage tiers, ensuring that your applications perform optimally when the resources are needed.

Diverse fiber points of entry and redundant 10 GbE high speed IP connectivity to major carriers. In addition, you have Carrier-neutral access to over 400 networks and service providers allowing you to tie your networks into an iland cloud solution.

Technical support for iland customers is included as part of your contract. You can access our Technical Support team using a number of options. The support team will:

1. Provide support and troubleshooting of network and hosted cloud infrastructure
2. Monitor agreed upon equipment, components and operating systems
3. Diagnose problems and offer resolutions on a 24x7x365 basis

Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Reston, and London are options for iland's managed cloud. Your data is usually located in the datacenter closest to you but it's your choice. iland Cloud Services is offered in our Dallas and London datacenters.

These questions all weigh heavily on the minds of ISVs who are evaluating a SaaS delivery model.  iland has assisted hundreds of SaaS providers as they face these challenges.  Our team has developed custom pricing models that consider potential volume, direct and indirect sales models, demos, training and proofs of concept to assist our customers in lowering their initial point of entry and enable them to scale their offering over time.  

You may or may not know what the likely take up rate will be. iland helps you figure out how to be competitive today and to hit the volumes you want to hit.  We will work with you to implement a volume discounting scheme that you can step into up front.

It doesn't matter whether your cloud infrastructure requirements are long or short-term, static or dynamic you retain control over your infrastructure.  Our portal gives you full access to your virtual datacenter resources, wherever and whenever you need them. You can deploy preconfigured virtual machines from catalog based templates, or use the open virtualization format (OVF) to upload your existing virtual infrastructure. You can grow or shrink your resources as needed. You can also allocate resources for temporary test environments, store archival data offsite, or extend your internal or public facing systems into the iland cloud.

Scaling is as simple as adding additional resources to existing machines, or building new ones which you can do through iland's portal.

Maintain security and control over your virtual datacenter with policy-based user controls and virtual firewall technology. iland Cloud Services allow customers to connect securely with VPNs, set up users, grant varying degrees of access permissions, and record log data.

iland manages and maintains multiple customers and end users in a secure, multi-tenancy vCloud powered environment.  For technology organizations with outside developers, iland's cloud platform offers end user self-deployment within security parameters that can be set up by the SaaS provider.  For example, within vCloud Director (vCD) an organization's admin can restrict or grant visibility to specific users to see vApps, templates, catalogs or management tabs within the portal.  This makes it possible to preconfigure security parameters so that a vCD environment is on a self-service basis by the end user but the SaaS provider maintains complete control.

Dedicated virtual datacenters (vDCs) can be set up to enable isolation of resources and also offer the benefits of a direct costing model with each vDC being billed directly.

iland SaaS Cloud is built on VMware technology which means that our cloud has high availability backed up by our 99.99% Service Level Agreement.  We know that companies offering SaaS cannot endure any downtime – particularly those companies in startup mode whose objective is to garner as many customers as possible in the early days.  To ensure high availability, our cloud computing services are provided within secured suites at each of our datacenters. Specifically designed for cloud computing, our SSAE 16/ISO 27001 certified datacenters are located in Boston, Washington D.C., Houston, Los Angeles, Dallas, and London.

While availability is important, iland SaaS customers also benefit from performance based SLAs to ensure the infrastructure, and ultimately your applications perform at their best.  iland's cloud environment is multi-tenanted but, unlike other IaaS providers, your neighbors have no effect on your performance. Why? Built on VMware technology we guarantee Service Levels of 99.99% for network and I/O performance.  Again, unlike other IaaS providers, iland deploys virtual machines in the same facility with dedicated resources to ensure consistent network and application performance.  iland has an n+1 or greater redundancy on all of our infrastructure components and because it is built on VMware technology, it offers an extremely high level of availability and reliability.

Customers using iland Cloud Services can manage their cloud infrastructure through the vCloud Director portal.  Each organization is provided with an administrator user name and password that will give them full access to their resources and the ability to configure additional access for other users to manage the portal.  Within the portal users can create, modify, or delete VMs, networks, and user access.  Organizations can also choose to leverage the vCloud API to programmatically manage the infrastructure.

Total cost of ownership is reduced because you no longer need to spend money on hardware and IT maintenance.  And you can shift your focus from one of managing and maintaining your IT infrastructure to developing your software to meet the needs of your customers.  For example, one iland customer that no longer has to deal with unplanned hardware downtime or maintenance has been able to reduce its server admin teams by 57% giving it huge cost savings.

Yes – iland offers a cloud Proof of Concept that gives you an affordable staging environment to test your applications to be delivered in a SaaS model, reduces your risk, and helps alleviate any concerns you may have about running in a virtual environment.  A POC model allows you to roll over from sampling our cloud platform to using us for production.  You can then either carry on with your pay as you go model (PAYG) or save it and convert to a reservation pool if desired.

Moving your production applications to our vCloud powered cloud, whether on a PAYG or reserved pool model, gives you a self-service approach that allows you to deploy from templates and enables you to import existing preconfigured machines via ovf import or vCloud Connector within minutes.

iland provides you with a SaaS enablement framework that follows a sequence of events including technical discovery, migration, testing, scale strategy, go to market, provisioning and support processes, compliance, security, certification, audit processes and more .  Our considerable experience in transitioning organizations to a SaaS model can be seen with the numerous SaaS customers we have and the SaaS use cases available on our website.  And in most cases we have deployed SaaS customers in a very short time period.

Typically no. iland can support a broad platform of Operating Systems running on our infrastructure.  We also support a broad number of networking methods including DMZ/Internal, VPN, P2P, MPLS and others that meet the vast majority of our SaaS customers' topologies. Because our customers are the ones that maintain the OS/Application layer, no changes in policies are typically required.

Increasing numbers of IT buyers see SaaS as their preferred choice when it comes to reducing costs, improving service, benefiting from functionality upgrades, getting started quickly and easily and enduring much less infrastructure hassle. They want to be able to pay for software on a monthly basis rather than buying perpetual licenses.

ISVs are responding by transitioning their software delivery models to cloud-based SaaS. If you have not yet transitioned to a SaaS model you should not only be prepared to do so but also equip your organization to offer a stronger supporting role for your software applications.  Converting to a cloud-based SaaS delivery model with iland shifts responsibility for hardware, systems availability and backups to iland while you focus on extending your reach to customers – including those that could not previously afford your software.