Every business is created differently, even if two businesses are working in the same field or industry, they will operate in different ways. From an information technology (IT) perspective, in the past this used to be one of the main problems for businesses to deal with. This is because there is no single or "perfect" way to to create an infrastructure for a company.

There was no set-in-stone template to follow, or any reassurances or confirmation that you had done anything properly and set everything up in the correct way. This has been one of the most challenging aspects of starting your own business for many years. 

Nowadays, custom cloud solutions are alleviating this concerns and problems for companies. These solutions give companies a wide variety of benefits, which are generally specific to these types of solutions. This level of flexibility, IT cost savings, and personalized assistance are not available with any options other than custom cloud solutions.

Advantages of Custom Cloud Solutions

The three main advantages mentioned at the end of the last section show how custom cloud solutions sets themselves apart from any other options, so let's take a closer look at these three benefits:

Extreme Agility and Flexibility

Custom cloud solutions will aid your company in maintaining agility and flexibility, which will give it a huge advantage for conducting business. It will allow the business to very quickly scale it's infrastructure resources (storage, servers, networking) up or down depending on the needs of the company. This can be explained as being similar to having a "just-in-time" inventory of infrastructure services and components. This also means that the company will only pay for the infrastructure that they need and use.

This in turn means that anything that is spent on these resources will always deliver a good Return On Investment (ROI), and when the services or components aren't needed anymore, they are simply taken away and costs reduced. 

IT Cost Savings

That brings us to our next point, cost savings in the IT department. One of the main reasons that a company will choose to go for a managed cloud solution is the price. This will give a business everything they need to get up and running straight away, which seems great. When the cloud environment is managed in-house, it can be hard to maintain total transparency and make sure that your business is using all of the technology that you have with your managed cloud solution.

With a custom cloud solution, the provider will put together everything you need, depending on your specific needs, to ensure that you have just what you need and nothing more. The major savings will be in the hardware, IT resources, operational software, and facility which will al be outsourced to a public cloud and managed service provider. Technical support and maintenance will also be handled by the provider, which will free up the time of IT staff to focus on the core of the business. 

Personalized Assistance

One of the main reasons that a business would go for a custom cloud solutions is that it comes with expert guidance that will be tailored to your specific business and its needs. For example, a lot of startups are in the biotech and pharmaceutical fields and they may be unfamiliar or even just unsure of the FDA compliance and IQ validation processes. When they go for a custom cloud solution, they can lean on their custom cloud provider to give them transition assistance to carry them through that critical time for their company.

A managed service provider can also help the company to assess their virtual maturity. They can provider the company with advice and help them choose between resources that they actually need. These providers can build systems that will help companies maintain compliance, and even keep up to date with important IT items like backups, disaster recovery, security, and managing data.

The cost of a managed service provider includes networking, virtualization, expertise in system admin, end point connectivity, and support. If a company was to try and hire just one person to do all of these tasks, first of all, it would have to be a very skilled person. Secondly, it would be virtually impossible to hire them for the same monthly price as the managed service provider. It also means that you do not have to deal with hiring and managing any more IT professionals. 

What do you think of custom cloud solutions? Will you be considering one for your business, or do you work with one already? Clinked would love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments below!