Dan's Take

Nerdio for Azure

ITaaS for Microsoft's public cloud platform.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 08/11/2017

Nerdio has expanded its product portfolio to include an IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) offering for the Microsoft Azure cloud environment. It packages up base technology, including Microsoft's Office 365, virtual servers, backup and disaster recovery, security, and a management layer. It then provides IT automation, dynamic onboarding and provisioning, and simplified management tools for enterprises and managed service providers. Since others have been offering somewhat similar-sounding products and services for a while, I wondered what could differentiate Nerdio from those others. It seems to me that the company's history is the biggest clue.

Nerdio started life in 2005 as a consultancy, and eventually began to offer its own cloud services under the name Adar. In 2016, it enhanced the management layer of its cloud service by launching "Nerdio" and called it a "Private Cloud Platform." Now, it has moved this package of platform services combined with sophisticated, but simple, management tools to Microsoft's Azure public cloud.

AWS, however, is the leading supplier of cloud-computing services according to most IT industry research firms. Amazon's share of the market revenue falls into the range between 37 percent - 40 percent, depending upon the research firm doing the reporting. Microsoft's Azure is growing rapidly, however.

The big key here is that Microsoft has a large partner ecosystem. Nerdio appears to want to facilitate the adoption of Azure by providing a complete package to service providers, making it possible for them to ramp up their Azure-based offerings quickly and efficiently.

Dan's Take: A Long Road Still Ahead
Have we gotten to the place in which smaller enterprises are willing to host their IT infrastructure on Azure or some other cloud services platform? Nerdio seems to think so. The company appears to believe that it has solved the provisioning, security, administration, monitoring, and even backup/disaster recovery issues that have held back some enterprises. I, however, believe that the industry still has a long way to go to satisfy all the requirements enterprises face with regulatory compliance and security.

Even if major IT workloads reside somewhere in the cloud, enterprises still face the need to acquire, provision, monitor and manage their desktops, laptops, tablets and other intelligent devices that provide local applications and access to the cloud-based workloads. The tools being offered by Nerdio and their competitors seldom address these needs.  After all, staff and customers still need their own devices to access cloud-based services. That being said, Nerdio's approach, which appears to be based upon the "keep it simple" mindset, is interesting and worth a look.