FlexAnywhere solutions offer blueprints to solve most common IT challenges

To address these issues, businesses need trusted advisors who offer solid, business-enabling recommendations rather than a lengthy process of building snowflakes. Simply put, organizations need IT solution blueprints that can deploy quickly and fast-track their IT and business transformations.

Flexential is delivering just that.

The challenge: Improve application performance and reliability

IT performance and reliability can make or break a business. Downtime is expensive, and its costs reach well beyond lost productivity. Businesses that cannot ensure operational integrity risk tarnishing their corporate brands and their customers’ experiences. Achieving necessary performance and availability are critical to business success.

Use cases

“My customer needs higher SLA levels than I can deliver.”

The ability to meet a customer’s service level agreement (SLA) requirements increases a business’ ability to win new business and retain existing customers. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint includes a 100% data center power and network availability SLA and a five 9’s availability SLA for Flexential Cloud. It also offers architecture, design and implementation services through Flexential Professional Service (FPS) for creating high-availability configurations. To minimize unplanned downtime, Flexential disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution provides a recovery point objective (RPO) SLA within seconds, a recovery time objective (RTO) SLA of less than two hours and a 30-minute SLA to initiate backup restores.

“I need to ensure my applications are always available.” 

Application availability hinges on combining redundant and highly available infrastructure, defending against interruptions and recovering quickly from unexpected downtime. Outages happen, and businesses need to be prepared to swiftly address them to help ensure 100% uptime for their applications and data. However, many organizations lack a comprehensive approach to protect and recover from the unexpected.  

This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint supports DRaaS strategies with near-zero RTO/RPO and testing options to promote confidence in the safety of applications and data during a fail-over. To reduce the risk of cyber disruptions, Flexential also offers proactive, preventative and comprehensive risk and cybersecurity services. And to protect your most critical applications, a range of high-availability infrastructure options can be tailored to your requirements.

“Every time my ISP has an outage in Minnesota, my users in the Midwest cannot access their applications.”

In a digital world, connectivity is king. However, the lack of a diverse and redundant connectivity strategy means a simple ISP outage can cripple businesses. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint offers a highly redundant network architecture with points of presence (POPs) in every major U.S. carrier hotel across 38 markets. Leveraging Flexential’s more than 350 on-net providers, and network architecture services from Flexential Professional Services, customers can build connectivity strategies that promote network resiliency, performance, security, manageability and visibility. These blueprints support network availability for the clouds, colocation, edge, on-premises, and third-party services you need to connect while protecting user experiences from outages.

“How do I achieve visibility of my infrastructure capacity and performance, so I know when to plan infrastructure refreshes?” 

IT teams need visibility into their IT environments to help plan for the future. Without insight into their environments, performance can suffer and impact the business’s ability to maintain its competitive edge. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint offers real-time visibility into infrastructure capacity and performance through its Flexential Xperience Portal (FXP), DevOps environment observability and virtual environment visibility.

FXP’s self-service portal offers a holistic view of environments, allowing customers to monitor and manage their colocation, Flexential Cloud, DRaaS and backup-as-a-service (BaaS) environments in real-time. Flexential DevOps services include 24x7 operations management for your DevOps environment, including container orchestration, automation and observability.

Additionally, Flexential customers also have access to VMware vCloud Director (vCD) to manage multi-tenant cloud environments and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) to help monitor, troubleshoot, and manage the performance and capacity of their virtual environments.

The challenge: Agility and ability to scale

The rapid-fire pace of business requires companies to quickly pivot and scale to address changing business landscapes and end-user demands.

Use cases

“I need agile IT solutions to quickly and seamlessly meet new business requirements.”

CIOs rely on the agility of their IT deployments to meet new business needs quickly and seamlessly. The speed and ease with which an organization can react to new demands is critical to success. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint offers hybrid IT strategies that can connect data center space, cloud resources and hyperscale on-ramps to allow companies to quickly create and integrate new services and tools or move workloads with flexing business requirements. Flexential’s connectivity options also support this agility, enabling organizations to connect core data centers, edge deployments and clouds.

“I need to scale resources up and down to keep pace with rapidly changing demand.”

CIOs need the ability to quickly and efficiently scale IT resources, corresponding infrastructure and data center footprints to address continually evolving business needs. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint utilizes Flexential’s data centers, cloud resources and connectivity options to offer seamless scalability. Flexential also allows organizations to reallocate contracted dollars between Flexential products and services to protect customers’ IT investments as they adapt their IT solutions.

“Our infrastructure is aging and requires significant investments. How do I optimize short-term costs and limit long-term investments?”

Infrastructure ages, requiring CIOs to invest in new data center equipment. Many CIOs are moving away from an owned-infrastructure model in favor of an OpEx strategy. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint allows organizations to avoid costly capital expenditures and long-term commitments while modernizing their IT infrastructure. With outsourced hybrid IT solutions, organizations can achieve the security, performance and data protection they need, across various workloads and connections, with predictable costs and flexible contract terms. The Flexential Professional Services team is also always available to offer their experience and expertise to help customers architect and transform into cost-effective, modern IT landscapes.

The challenge: Improve network performance and interconnect to public clouds, partners, and customers

Reliable, high-performing connections are necessary to keep businesses operating effectively. Connecting to the public cloud and an expanding ecosystem of providers, partners and customers is vital in today’s business landscape. But, just connecting is not enough. Low-latency, secure, reliable connections are vital for modern businesses that utilize real-time applications across a distributed environment.

Use cases

“I need to improve my network response time and create predictable performance for distributed users.”

Distributed workforces are here to stay, and businesses need high-performing, low-latency network solutions that allow remote employees and distributed users to work efficiently. Flexential offers low-latency connections between edge locations, core data centers, and clouds via its private 100GB network backbone. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint also leverages Flexential’s standardized components to provide consistent configuration and connectivity options across its national portfolio for predictable, high-performance results. Organizations can also leverage Flexential Professional Services for added expertise in building an edge strategy that supports distributed users with predictable performance.

“I need to provide a secure, reliable network to the core data centers, delivered in a standard, repeatable fashion.

As edge solutions are integrated into IT strategies to offer lower latency connections, organizations need to ensure data security as it travels between edge deployments and the core data center. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint provides a private, secure and fully managed network to connect to hyperscale cloud providers, back-office platforms, our colocation facilities, carrier hotels or to the edge of the internet. Flexential offers proactive DDoS protection with managed IP bandwidth services to further protect data. These connectivity solutions are consistent across Flexential’s portfolio to ensure the same secure, high-performing solution across all deployments.   

“I need to improve reliability to my cloud provider and reduce single points of failure on the network.”

Cloud deployments are increasingly integrated into IT strategies, making reliable cloud connections essential to provide end-users with better performance. This FlexAnywhere® Solution blueprint uses Cloud Fabric for secure, low-latency, direct connections to the leading cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. To reduce single points of failure, the network is continually monitored to ensure its performance and reliability, and Flexential offers a 100% network uptime and bandwidth commitment.

Based on 1,000 real-life engagements—and road-tested by our Customer Advisory Council—FlexAnywhere® Solutions provide best practices for accelerating the deployment of hybrid IT solutions, improving availability, infrastructure performance and interconnection reliability to public clouds, partners and customers.

What is your customer challenge and use case? Learn more about our new blueprints here.