In order to combat the challenges managed service providers (MSPs) face in migrating small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to the Microsoft Cloud, Nerdio has introduced a new IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) offering for Microsoft Azure.
Founded back in 2005 as an MSP, Nerdio has primarily worked through its privatized version of this ITaaS solution in VMware Horizon. Due to the lack of similar offerings in the marketplace for Azure, the company decided to recreate their offering for the Microsoft Cloud.
“We are taking that business model and automated IT, but instead of doing it in the VMware cloud, it does it in Microsoft Azure,” said Vadim Vladimirskiy, co-founder and CEO of Nerdio. “One important point of differentiation is that Nerdio is not a point solution. It’s not a virtual desktop, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Officer 365, or just backup and disaster recovery. We take a very holistic view of IT and we integrate all the core technologies tightly together to create a standardized but very efficient, high performance service that’s easy to manage.”
Nerdio on Azure is designed to fully automate the provisioning of an entire virtual desktop-centric IT environment in Azure. According to Nerdio, migrating an SMB’s entire IT environment to the cloud can be done in three clicks, and in under two hours.
This ITaaS solution revolves around five core technologies:
- Virtual servers – data applications, active directory,
- Office 365 – productivity and collaboration
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Full security stack – includes antivirus, firewall, content filtering, threat management, etc.
- Virtual desktop – gives end-users consistent access to all of their data and applications regardless of what device or location they are in
However, the key cog in this solution is the management layer that encompasses these five technologies. Nerdio is taking industry-leading technologies, and standardizing those five components to a create a management layer that allows for fully automated provisioning of those five components in a perfectly tuned IT environment.
“It’s like a single pane of glass portal that lets you manage all of those five pieces all in one place,” said Vladimirskiy. “Instead of having to manage servers in one cloud, and Office 365 somewhere else, we bring it all into one portal and let you manage everything in one place. And each technology is fully integrated with each other.”
What makes this offering enticing to channel partners is the ability to wrap other solutions around the Nerdio offering. This allows Microsoft channel partners to resell a migration process without having the need to find an expert on the matter.
“[MSPs] don’t need to know Azure or Office 365 nuances, they just have to be able to manage it from our portal and we will do all the stuff behind the scenes,” said Vladimirskiy. “They can wrap other offerings around the management layer which is wrapped around these industry leading technologies and they now have a per user, per month-based offering that is very standardized but very differentiated from their competitors.”
Nerdio’s ITaaS offering is now available as a trial and proof of concept. For more, you can read more here.