K3 launches cloud hosting and consultancy service

Whether moving an established business into the cloud for the first time or trying to pinpoint the issues involved with using the cloud to take a business global, companies can face a difficult set of problems. For many of them, this will be of `this is about IT, but not as we know it.’ There are only two ways of finding answers to these problems – hard, usually time-consuming personal experience, making many mistakes along the way; or turning to a specialist consultancy service for guidance and help. Yes, the latter option costs, but that is counter-balanced by the ability to cut the time to market and being free to concentrate on the core business. 

In a move to target the latter option, K3 Business Technology Group (K3) has launched a new IT consultancy division with the aim of deploying and managing secure cloud services all over the world. It comes with the company’s access to 300 international datacentres, together with a complete one-stop-shop for IT infrastructure support, maintenance and protection.

Known as K3 Hosting, it has been set up in response to overwhelming demand from companies in the retail, manufacturing, finance and public sectors for cloud-based IT services, both throughout the UK and overseas. The new company builds on the foundations laid down by the previous K3 Managed Services division, with products and services being expanded and further developed to provide a wide range of cloud and managed service support, all over the world.

At the heart of the service is K3 Hosting’s own Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, which it has developed to help businesses worldwide solve the challenges of constantly having to invest in, maintain, and manage their own datacentre infrastructures. This is a hosted Enterprise Class Cloud Service built on the latest technology, with options for dedicated or shared IT infrastructure resources that allow businesses to shift their IT focus and receive dynamic IT provision.

The IaaS capability joins a range of other services provided by the company, including infrastructure services such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Hardware as a Service (HaaS) and Network as a Service (NaaS), together with more specific applications-oriented  services such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Project Management facilities. The result, the company claims, is a complete one-stop-shop for IT infrastructure support, maintenance and protection.

When it comes to storage K3 Hosting has been set up to provide a simpler storage option to try and cope with the ever-expanding demand. IDC, for example, estimates that in the years between 2009 and 2020, the size of the digital universe will increase 44 fold, resulting in a 41 percent increase in capacity every year. This is expected to take the total capacity required from 800 Exabytes to 35,000 Exabytes.

K3 Hosting’s solution to managing Big Data is its Storage as a Service (STaaS) solution. The economy of scale in K3 Hosting’s infrastructure allows the company to provide storage much more cost effectively than most corporations can provide their own storage. This is thanks to its global MPLS network and over 300 points of presence (POPs), eliminating 37 percent of the costs associated to storage in the datacentre. 

This will, of course, be dependent on whether data is subject to data sovereignty or compliance restrictions.

“For many organisations, maintaining an IT infrastructure can be a difficult task that takes resources away from its main focus,” said Neil Farnworth, Managing Director of K3 Hosting. “That’s why cloud based services are in demand and we have seen interest in our own cloud provision increase significantly over the past few years. That’s why we are launching K3 Hosting and our own IaaS offering, so we can support business critical systems and help companies save money and enhance productivity, taking the hassle of IT infrastructure away.”