OpenCloud - The Technical & Business Benefits feat. Pat Cannon
Cloud – What’s been working
Over the past 11 years, I’ve spent a large portion of my professional career meeting with business leaders and other IT professionals to better understand their cloud strategy's goals and map those to technical solutions. I’ve followed many of those customers throughout their journey. The perceived value of their choices for cloud has varied, as have the business outcomes. For most, they were able to refocus technical staff on higher value business initiatives successfully. They no longer needed to spend a large portion of their time vetting new technology and managing infrastructure. The time they got back allowed them to execute on backlogged projects and, in some cases, application and data modernization. I’ve also observed better operational efficiency and a strengthened security posture. The structure and rigor around security and operations for us on the Service Provider side have been a key area of benefit for these customers. Our CISO, Trevor Bidle, reviews this in-depth in his Perspective on Utilizing OpenCloud for Hosting Compliant Workloads blog. Scalability has been another undeniable benefit, as more resources can be delivered in minutes.
Cloud – Opportunities for improvement
If I’m being honest, though, I’ve also observed shortcomings. When we think of the cloud, most envision balanced technical flexibility with cost efficiency. While public cloud models offer some interesting consumption flexibility, customers are often left on their own without migration guidance, meaningful support, or escalation paths. The unknown nature of data egress fees from the public cloud has also been cited as a problem for some customers. It appeared we were chasing a “cloud unicorn” or Public “like” cloud consumption in a private cloud model. I’ve also seen a variation in performance for many workloads when moved out of their data centers to a distant cloud. Edge solutions have risen to solve this challenge, but most providers lack the ability to deliver a homogenous network to tie it all together. Add a lack of self-service, non-native ability to support containers, vendor lock-in, and inflexible contracts, and a clear picture of some gaps within the cloud marketplace begins to emerge.
It’s for these reasons I couldn’t be more excited about the future of how we at US Signal are evolving our offerings to better support our customers as we introduce our new product, OpenCloud. OpenCloud is unique for several reasons. Let’s outline some of this cloud unicorn's technical and business benefits.
Technical Benefits of OpenCloud
High Availability – OpenCloud was architected with the same design principles as our previous Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings. Redundancy across computing, networking, and storage to ensure the highest availability for customer workloads. We still offer the same 100% SLA on Compute and Memory resources.
Scalability – What would a cloud solution be without the ability to scale? Take the guesswork out of capacity planning. We’ve got you covered. OpenCloud’s easily scalable architecture supports your growing workloads, whether ephemeral, static, or a combination.
Performance – Enterprise class compute, networking and all flash storage ensure optimal performance for your critical workloads. Pre-defined instance sizes to match common CPU/MEM profiles.
Multi-Hypervisor Support – The future is not just VMware. OpenCloud’s KVM Hypervisor brings Native Kernel Integration (efficient memory management, CPU scheduling, and I/O performance) and strong VM isolation (secure virtualization), making it a natural fit for multi-tenant environments. This approach is all about optionality to match the technical needs of our customers.
Self-Service Consumption – You asked for it, so we are giving it to you! Self-service capabilities in OpenCloud empower our customers with the ability to deploy and manage virtual machines, networks, and storage on demand. Control your own destiny, streamline operations and delivery resources faster. Stay tuned as we add more capabilities to ease our customer’s cloud journeys!
Business Benefits of OpenCloud
Cost Efficiency – Cost flexibility is no longer limited to the Public cloud. US Signal’s OpenCloud allows you to pay by the day or month, with on-demand and committed instance billing options. Mix and match committed instance billing with on-demand to achieve the best flexibility for your business. True public-like cloud consumption in a private cloud model.
Security & Compliance – Take the guesswork out of securing your data and meeting compliance. OpenCloud leverages network segmentation, workload isolation, Role-based Access Control, and extensive logging capabilities to achieve enhanced security and meet common compliance standards.
Vendor Independence – Let’s face it: the increase in VMware pricing was a big wake-up call for all of us. With multi-hypervisor support, OpenCloud can help your business control costs and avoid vendor lock-ins.
Support for Hybrid Cloud Models – The future is hybrid, and OpenCloud will allow our customers the flexibility to integrate across edge, private cloud, and public cloud computing models. Empower your IT teams to remain App-focused. Let US Signal deliver reliable, secure, and performant infrastructure and achieve a faster time-to-market for your workloads.
Geographic Diversity – Achieve the location diversity your business requires with deployments in Detroit, MI, and Denver, CO. Spread production workloads across both markets or dedicate one for production and disaster recovery. With our expansive fiber optic network and growing data center footprint, we can deploy OpenCloud where you need it, even at your edge.
Conclusion
US Signal’s OpenCloud offers customers balanced technical capabilities with cost flexibility, solving many challenges with traditional cloud models. The ability to deliver this next generation of IaaS across a secure homogenous network, layering in best-of-breed data protection, managed security, colocation, public cloud, managed and professional services makes US Signal a premium provider of Digital Infrastructure. Our customer-centric approach and commitment to unparalleled 24/7/365 support ensures your operations always run smoothly. Stay focused on your business, and US Signal will stay focused on helping you stay agile, resilient, and future-ready, no matter how your cloud needs evolve.