An apparent trend of the modern market is creating cloud services and delivering them from reliable data centers in full compliance with the fault tolerance and data backup rules.
A Product from Russia
Softline is a Russian company providing its clients with numerous cloud services.
Our entire infrastructure is located in Russia, with main sites in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Vladivostok. New facilities will soon be opened in Alma-Ata and Kiev.
The support service is also based in our country—in Moscow and Voronezh. Three support lines of Voronezh Support and Monitoring Center are available in 24x7 mode. The Call Center receives calls around the clock; it has a service management system, which enables direct ticket registration via a secure protocol. This approach is very convenient because, in many cases, the requests are immediately transferred to the second processing line, so that each customer receives a dedicated HelpDesk service. Softline uses the same workflows as large cloud services such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon.
So, from the cloud infrastructure point of view, our product is 100% made in Russia.
Reliability
We use fault-tolerant hardware located in a Tier3 international data center, with a secure internet connection, uninterrupted power supply, and fire suppression system.
The cloud infrastructure is powered by dedicated hardware, and if a disk or server goes offline, the client company will not even notice it: its virtual machine will continue to run without interruptions. There are numerous examples that the baseline fault tolerance of cloud infrastructure is higher than that of the client's in-house infrastructure.
Penetrating into Softline's data center is very difficult—not only for outsiders but even for our engineers, which don't have access to it. This is a huge advantage of the cloud. The main vulnerability of any system is the people who service it. Our customers most often have several IT engineers responsible for specific systems. They are usually known to everyone, have a full set of administrative rights, and understand the value of the information they store—and unfortunately, therefore, can put it at risk (for example, sell it).
Clouds have a better baseline security model. A specific administrator in Voronezh does not have direct access to information of a given customer. They do not know where the customer’s data are located or what does the customer store. They cannot, for example, sneak in and steal information media. There is no specific server hosting the IT system of any given customer—Softline has a shared cloud infrastructure, which serves hundreds of our customers.
In-house cloud service: IaaS & PaaS
If you are planning to build your own cloud service, the easiest thing to do now is to address Softline: we support almost all popular OS and database standards. If your company has a proprietary cloud service that needs to be moved to the cloud, we have two options: IaaS, when you can rent the necessary set of virtual resources, and PaaS. In the latter case, customers can program their infrastructure in a pre-configured environment, and, for example, work with a database as a service.
The Russian market is developing in exactly the same way as the markets of other countries. In the beginning, Western countries were interested most in IaaS—and that's what we see now in Russia: virtual capacity sales are at the peak. At the same time, the attention to services—and especially email, corporate portals, and messengers—is growing. Analysts predict an increase of interest in PaaS, which mirrors the trend seen in Western markets a couple of years ago.
The main competition for IaaS is ordinary physical servers still bought by some companies. More than 95% of organizations today keep using on-premise infrastructure despite the evident cloud trends in the market. The server market has been falling for three consecutive years, and this is a global trend. The potential for classic IaaS is still huge in the near future.
Softline can help any organization—even a governmental one—build an in-house cloud service as quickly and reliably as possible. Ask our experts for details!
Out-of-the-box services save your time and money
Let’s imagine that your company needs to upgrade its email. There are two project approaches. In the first case, you buy import or domestic hardware and software, hire implementation experts… but the results are unpredictable in terms of time and reliability. There is no guarantee that, after spending an immense amount of resources and many months, the company will receive the environment and configuration planned initially. Sometimes even projects that seem effortless drag on for a year or more. There can be a vast number of reasons: no financing, no rack space, the retirement of the key engineer, or a change of priorities...
When you use cloud infrastructure, you purchase an out-of-the-box service. Almost immediately, you get an out-of-the-box infrastructure that can be configured the way you want. For example, if you're going to build a cloud hosted at your site, that's not a problem. We deliver hardware, configure software, support the system, and give you full control and monitoring capabilities. The more "closed" the organization is, the higher its requirements for infrastructure control are.
Solving the import substitution dilemma
It is very challenging to find full Russian analogs of leading Western products. There is no strict border between Russian and American IT markets, they are intertwined. If a product outperforming its analogs appears, it pushes the competitors both out of the Russian and global markets. Nevertheless, the global trend is to abandon software ownership in favor of cloud services. Import substitution requirements are an excellent argument to make this step a little faster, first of all, for Russian companies. For example, there is no point in buying a foreign email solution if there are numerous Russian analogs, which you can deploy and use as a service.
Softline is unique in that we provide all essential services out of the box. That is, our customers do not need complex projects to implement an email solution—we have ready-to-use email services, which cover 80-90% of the basic IT infrastructure needs. We work with simple and clear "building blocks" that can be used to implement all required functions.
