WESTED CASE STUDY. WestEd Case Study: Integrating Colo with Cloud THE CLEAR ADVANTAGES TO MOVING TO A HYBRID CLOUD WITH UNITEDLAYER

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1 WESTED CASE STUDY WestEd Case Study: Integrating Colo with Cloud THE CLEAR ADVANTAGES TO MOVING TO A HYBRID CLOUD WITH UNITEDLAYER

2 WestEd is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research, development, and service agency that works with education and other communities throughout the United States and abroad to improve education and other important outcomes for children, youth and adults. Before UnitedLayer Before moving to UnitedLayer, WestEd had colo infrastructure within a data center. They paid a premium for the location and were required to pay for additional space that they simply did not need. With UnitedLayer WestEd starting working with UnitedLayer and was immediately able to cut colo costs by 50%. In addition, UnitedLayer provided them with the appealing capability to virtualize. Virtualization is important to WestEd, and they were happy to find a company that does colo and virtualization, a combination that is quite rare.

3 Why is Virtualization (the Cloud) Important? Virtualization makes it possible to run multiple operating systems and applications on the same server at the same time. What are the Benefits of Virtualization (the Cloud)? INCREASED IT AGILITY FASTER DEPLOYMENT OF WORKLOADS BETTER FLEXIBILITY MINIMIZED DOWNTIME ABILITY TO SCALE INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY REDUCTION IN CAPITAL AND OPERATING COSTS BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DISASTER RECOVERY The option to virtualize (and go to the Cloud) was a very attractive advantage for choosing UnitedLayer. Managing the hardware is a time- consuming task for our small technical team, and the thought of us not having to run in crisis mode was very appealing to us. Denise Johnson WestEd s IT Operations Manager 50 percent of enterprises will have Hybrid Cloud by 2017

4 But WestEd was hesitant to move to the Cloud WestEd wanted to get out of the hardware business and move everything to the cloud. They wanted to help improve their IT team s quality of life by freeing up the resources spent supporting hardware on nights and weekends. The problem was, they found the entire process daunting. They realized the move wasn t going to happen overnight so they wanted to do it in phases. 82 percent of enterprises have a Hybrid Cloud strategy Moving out of the server support business was a clear advantage to moving to the cloud, but moving costs from capital to operational was an ever greater advantage for WestEd. The move to UnitedLayer UnitedLayer was quick to respond to our needs and provided us with a huge amount of support. Denise Johnson WestEd s IT Operations Manager

5 After the move UnitedLayer moved WestEd in two stages - colo and then to a Hybrid Cloud infrastructure a year later. Since moving to a Hybrid Cloud environment, WestEd has been able to experience, first- hand, UnitedLayer s support, flexibility, and integration capabilities. What are the clear advantages of this partnership? FLEXIBILITY ABILITY TO GROW INTEGRATION WestEd benefits from the following services: Colocation Network, circuits, IP, phone, video and other internal services Dedicated SAN Storage Integration between UnitedColo and United Private Cloud Private Cloud for Intranet, Authentication and E- mail They have a self managed Cloud with the comfort of knowing that UL can step in anytime and help out with managed services On- Premise servers for backups Their Hybrid Cloud involves three infrastructure types Colo for network, Private Cloud for and internet and on-premises servers for backing up data ABOUT UNITEDLAYER Headquartered in San Francisco, California - one of the most networked Internet points of presence in the world - UnitedLayer provides its customers with Hybrid Cloud Hosting Expertise, offering colocation, managed services, public and private clouds and business continuity solutions. GET IN TOUCH info@unitedlayer.com 1 (415) unitedlayer.com Copyright 2015 UnitedLayer, LLC. All Rights Reserved.