“We are thrilled to recognize Intel’s Partner Award winners across APJ and India,” said Trevor Vickers, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Global Partners and Support. “Our partners have achieved the highest standards in growth, innovation, and market acceleration. Congratulations to Cloud Kinetics for your remarkable achievements. We value your collaborative partnership and look forward to continued innovation and success.”

“We are proud to honor the exceptional collaboration between Intel and Cloud Kinetics in driving innovation and excellence in technology. APJ continues to be a leading growth region, and we value the collaboration with our partners in offering the best solutions and experiences to our customers. Thank you,” said Hans Chuang, Vice President & General Manager of Sales, Marketing and Communications Group – Asia Pacific and Japan.

Cloud Kinetics was awarded for continually applying their expertise in ways that help Intel’s products outshine competitors and win customers. Cloud Kinetics has also made significant contributions to revenue and increasing the number of channel partners reached on behalf of Intel.

To qualify as a winner in this category, organizations must be a member of the Intel Partner Alliance; demonstrate year over year (YoY) growth, as well as an increase in overall partner revenue, number of partners adopted, and/or is well-positioned to increase their expected YoY growth.

The post Cloud Kinetics Wins Outstanding Growth – Managed Services Award From Intel Corporation appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

One company at the nexus of airport facilities management was Angkasa Pura Supports (APS). Set up in 2012, APS is a PT Angkasa Pura I (Persero) subsidiary and provides comprehensive and integrated airport facility management services that uphold international standards. It supports 15 major airports throughout eastern Indonesia and offers similar services for commercial and public properties.

“Through its system supply, services and tools, APS offers the best services for passengers or airport visitors in Indonesia,” said Indra S Mara, APS’s Vice President for ICT. “APS has more than 14.000 employees with relevant certification and operates in 21 service points throughout Indonesian cities. Our vision was to become a world-class company with integrated IT-based services in the aviation industry.”

The challenge: Agility to match business growth

Since 2014, APS has been a member of the ISSA (International Sanitary Supply Association). In 2015, APS expanded its services from middle Indonesia to include East Indonesia through 21 service points.

“After three years and on-premise management, we realized we lacked the agility when it came to business initiatives,” said Roy Liston, APS’s Infrastructure and Business Support Manager. “A stable connectivity was vital for us to be able to deploy scalable infrastructure for web-based applications, at the same time catering to peak period demand while reducing costs and increasing security.”

APS sought an MSP (managed services partner) to help them with logistics coordination, execution and controlling costs. After going through a dozen presentations by various vendors, the company settled on the GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Google BigQuery for analytics, and UI (Unified Analytics) dashboards for real-time actionable management. Who would implement this? Google’s prime solution partner, Cloud Kinetics.

The solution: Migration to GCP with proactive monitoring

“We needed a GCP partner who could develop an organized plan that best suited our business. Not only that, we needed a partner that knew to make sure migration was smooth and could help us fully utilize the service offered by GCP,” Roy Liston said. “We chose Cloud Kinetics because they’re a premier partner of GCP and a certified company specializing in GCP infrastructure and migration. We needed a business and technology partner who could integrate backend services seamlessly on the cloud without disrupting our ongoing ICT functions. It was a tall order, but Cloud Kinetics ticked all the boxes.”

Sandy Kosasih, Chief Corporate Officer at Cloud Kinetics, points out how they implemented up-to-date migration practices and the best cloud architecture designs to achieve efficiency, resilience and scalability. “This helped seamlessly migrate nearly 100 workloads,” he said. “APS can now leverage on Google BigQuery Services, designed to make data more productive, agile, elastic and compatible with Google Cloud. APS was able to make data available in real-time while running complex analysis queries in seconds and scaling seamlessly by taking advantage of on-demand pricing.”

Stefhanie Sendjaya, Cloud Kinetics Account Manager for APS, said that Cloud Kinetics “also rolled out security managed services through 24/7 proactive monitoring and reporting. This assisted APS in dealing with external attacks and keeping the customer environment more secure.”

The Cloud Kinetics team proposed a scalable solution running on GCP for infra provisioning, app monitoring, network availability, and security incidents tracking and mitigation. GCP had the three core services – IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and serverless computing environment.

Cloud Kinetics provided 24/7 support for maintenance and proactive monitoring necessary for operations and analytics and security layers for continuous improvement. The benefits were remarkable.

The outcome: Lower capital & maintenance costs & 50% faster processes

“We managed to significantly lower our up-front capital costs and successfully reduced 25 per cent of monthly maintenance costs, thanks to Cloud Kinetics,” Indra S Mara said. “The time to set up, configure and implement was just one month. There has also been a great improvement in customer data analytics, with external users benefiting from 50 per cent faster processes and a wider range of insights on the data gathered throughout.”

“Cloud Kinetics is the top-tier MSP (managed services provider) on the GCP and an enterprise integration partner on VMware, NetApp, Dhruva, Cohesity, ServiceNow,” said Ted A, Cloud Kinetics’ Chief Revenue Officer. “Cloud Kinetics has operations in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Europe, and the US to help companies migrate to a hybrid cloud.”

Indonesia is becoming a hot spot for global tech companies keen to get into one of Asia’s fastest-growing data markets, Nikkei Asia reported on July 8, 2020. It’s where e-commerce and food delivery services are rapidly expanding due to the pandemic.

The trend toward data localization is also drawing the tech titans to the world’s fourth most populous country. “Indonesia is full of opportunity,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said during Google Cloud’s virtual launching ceremony in Jakarta on June 24, 2021. “It is one of Southeast Asia’s most creative, dynamic, and entrepreneurial countries with more than 150 million Internet users.”

The post How Indonesia’s Airport Facilities Provider Soared With Cloud Migration appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

“Vaksinku” is a national project to vaccinate Indonesians across the archipelago. In June 2021, the World Bank approved a loan of US$500 million to expand Indonesia’s efforts to respond to the pandemic, strengthen the preparedness of its health system, and support the government’s free vaccination program. Tne company that has been at the forefront of the vaccination project is PT Jasuindo Tiga Perkasa. Set up in 1991, the company has won a bouquet of awards, including Asia 200 Best under a Billion in 2011 and 2012 by Forbes Asia and the Top 50 Best-Performing Indonesian Companies by Forbes Indonesia in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2018.

Jasuindo was set up in 1991 and provides security solutions for documents, holograms, and payment and security cards. It also offers commercial printing solutions. MasterCard and Visa have certified Jasuindo for embedding the security chip in their credit cards. In 2013, the company’s joint venture entity began offering electronic embedding technology for passports in Indonesia and other ASEAN countries.

Scaling to a million transactions

“Our app served around 800,000 active users with more than a million transactions that a trusted partner needed to manage,” said Samantha Wijaya, General Manager of Jasuindo’s Vaksinku project. “We wanted a stable managed environment to deploy a scalable infrastructure for web-based apps while catering to peak period demand and reducing costs simultaneously.”

Jasuindo sought an MSP (managed services partner) to also help them with logistics coordination, timely execution and keeping costs under control. After going through a dozen presentations by various vendors, the company settled on the GCP (Google Cloud Platform), MySQL database on cloud, Google BigQuery for analytics, and UI (Unified Analytics) dashboards for real-time actionable management. Who would implement this? Google’s prime solution partner, Cloud Kinetics (CK).

We wanted a robust solution that could keep in step with our growth aspirations. We were rapidly diversifying into new products and markets. We needed a business and technology partner who could integrate backend services seamlessly on the cloud without disrupting our ongoing ICT functions. It was a tall order, but Cloud Kinetics ticked all the boxes. Samantha Wijaya, General Manager, Jasuindo Vaksinku

The CK team proposed a scalable solution running on GCP for infra provisioning, apps monitoring, network availability, and security incidents tracking and mitigation. GCP had the three core services – IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and serverless computing environment.

The Google Operations Suite (previously called Stackdriver) is a systems management service that provides performance and diagnostics data for monitoring, logging, tracing, error reporting, and alerting. Stackdriver is a multi-cloud solution and was ideal for Jasuindo’s needs.

“CK is the top-tier MSP (managed services provider) on the GCP and an enterprise integration partner on VMware, NetApp, Dhruva, Cohesity, ServiceNow,” said Ted A, CK’s Chief Revenue Officer. “CK has operations in Singapore, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Europe, and the US to help companies migrate to a hybrid cloud.”

Smart and responsive solution with managed services

CK provided 24/7 support for maintenance and proactive monitoring necessary for Jasuindo’s distributed operations and analytics and security layers for continuous improvement. Its proprietary Arcus Smart Cloud Management platform provided automated Terraform templates to deploy “infra as a code” and a single pane of glass for integrated monitoring and management.

The benefits were remarkable. Jasuindo saw a 20% drop in monthly IT operation costs due to application streamlining.

“CK partners with our clients to navigate the complex landscape of cloud transformation and make strategic IT decisions,” Ted said. “The CK team is ready to build digital roadmaps and deployments with clients from cloud migration to cloud-managed services, from app modernization to data analytics.”

The seamless integration of software helped our teams collaborate and coordinate logistics with demand. We could also consolidate and monitor all operations from a single view with Cloud Kinetics’ assurance and committed 99.9% availability. CIO, Jasuindo

If the pandemic has proved anything, it is the importance of rapid adaptability in the face of uncertainty. Every company has learned that digital is critical for business success. Jasuindo understood this tenet and worked closely with CK to enable access across the massively spread-out Indonesian archipelago.

“The solutions worked like a charm,” the CIO added. “It was well integrated with production. We could scale it with multiple BUs in due course. We were glad that Cloud Kinetics provided systems operations and support as well. Cloud Kinetics also aligned it to our IT governance and service delivery model for seamless integration.”

Indonesia is becoming a hot spot for global tech companies keen to get into one of Asia’s fastest-growing data markets, Nikkei Asia reported on July 8, 2020. It’s where e-commerce and food delivery services are rapidly expanding due to the pandemic. The trend toward data localization is also drawing the tech titans to the world’s fourth most populous country. “Indonesia is full of opportunity,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said during Google Cloud’s virtual launching ceremony in Jakarta on June 24, 2021. “It is one of Southeast Asia’s most creative, dynamic, and entrepreneurial countries with more than 150 million Internet users.”

The post Injecting Inspiration Into Indonesia’s Vaccination Initiative With Cloud Managed Services appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The true cost of an employee

With IT talent now universally in high demand, employee costs such as wages, employer contribution, medical insurance, annual bonuses, and more compound with every technical hire that the company makes, making it exponentially more expensive to adopt new technologies.

Companies are paying 54 percent more in wages for technical roles and hiring specialists purely for just one or two systems risks underutilizing their talents, which makes the hire cost-inefficient. Even if existing IT staff are expected to pick up new specializations, they need to be sent for training to be certified, which still incurs expenses – especially since these certifications must be periodically renewed due to the fast pace of technology advancement.

Conversely, MSP teams are fully certified and are always up-to-date with recent technology trends due to the nature of their work. Thus, it is often more cost-efficient and productive to outsource IT management to MSP teams instead of hiring and training an in-house team from scratch.

Maintaining in-house systems and programs

Companies tend to build in-house IT teams to have complete control over their IT systems. However, this means that IT teams are solely responsible for purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading all the company’s hardware and software.

Besides increasing the total cost of ownership (TCO), the IT team also has to balance this full-time responsibility alongside other operational tasks, which can stretch them thin and run a higher risk of burnout as more technologies are introduced. If not properly managed, businesses can end up with patchwork and/or legacy systems that become inefficient over time, as well as overpaying for underused programs or services.

With the support of an MSP, in-house IT teams can offload more advanced or labor-intensive systems to them and focus on critical issues. The MSP can also ensure that companies are optimizing their services and technologies to maximize their return on investment.

Potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities

Given the sizable costs of an organizational data breach – up to US$2.62 million in Southeast Asia alone – the increasing number of cyberattacks on ASEAN businesses is cause for concern. In a 2020 Kaspersky survey, ASEAN respondents most feared data loss and targeted attacks, as well as electronic data leakage from internal systems.

However, most in-house IT teams cannot comprehensively handle cybersecurity on their own, especially with their other existing duties. Not only do they have to constantly monitor systems for potential cyber threats within and without the organization, but they also have to respond immediately to neutralize breaches or attacks and stay abreast of the latest developments in cybersecurity.

Engaging an MSP can be a suitable alternative for companies looking to shore up their cybersecurity defenses. They can provide round-the-clock monitoring and rapid response upon threat detection, and will likely be more efficient in eliminating threats due to their expertise.

Managed services outsourcing for greater efficiency

With the global managed services market expected to hit US$274.2 billion by 2026, it is clear that more companies are realizing the value of MSPs in supporting their IT team as they undergo digital transformation.

At Cloud Kinetics, a managed services providers we provide comprehensive, 24/7 cloud-managed services that have helped many businesses use their resources more efficiently and stay more resilient in a digital era. Get in touch with us and let us do the heavy lifting for you.

The post Hidden Costs of Managing IT <br>In-House appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.