Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of Eon Networks

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of  Eon Networks becoming a Cloud Partner from a traditional Channel Partner. Vikas Gupta, Systems Manager shared his entire journey about how his organisation has moved to the cloud business, challenges, growth, and future vision. 

When and how did you move to Cloud business?

We started to offer Cloud services the day Microsoft Launched its SaaS-based emailing solution in India. We were looking for a robust emailing solution for one of our Pharma client and we were discussing Premise Exchange Server and then Office365 was launched in 2011 and we decided to give it a try in 2012. It turned out to be a seamless experience for both Eon Networks and our customers.

What kind of changes have you done to facilitate this move within the organisation in terms of the team, skill set, infrastructure and others?

Change is evident and we took this as an opportunity for our people also to grow them as per the market trends. In order to achieve that we did a right fusion of getting new skilled professionals as well as upskilling our existing professionals. It was important for everyone to understand the need of this and invest time in self-studying too with right guidance provided through hands-on training and study materials. It turned out to be an amazing journey for everyone and OEM also helped us to manage this well.

How are your old and new customers adopting the new technology and moving to the Cloud?

It’s important to make customers aware of the features and security aspects of Cloud infrastructure and then make them understand the limitations by both qualitative as well as quantitative comparison of different types of services. SMB clients are adopting Cloud because of the Pay-as-you-use model and are saving their capital expenditure and scale when it is actually required. Enterprise client is adapting because of flexibility and accessibility across all locations and devices.

Previously on Cloud Journey: Flentas

How is your organisation equipped to meet the demands of cloud security?

There is a lot of worry about cloud security, hardware and other networking peripherals, as it is not in our scope. These are being taken care of by Cloud Service Providers. still, we have apprehensions about data and application stored on the Cloud. Cloud stored data require much lesser efforts but require a good understanding of technology and follow best practices and keep updating the policies as per the latest threats and trends.

We have seen the organisations are still using legacy tools to protect their Cloud. they should instead explore modern security tools which are more capable of providing comprehensive and consistent security. 2FA implementation is simple yet very effective and also gives more confidence to users.

What challenges did you face in this journey?

Hiring a new set of people with specialised skill sets is easy but capability enhancement of the existing workforce is a challenge. At the same time selecting the right set of products/OEMs and making them on board is also important. We do exhaustive research on product capability and its market acceptability before stitching any new deals. One of the challenges has been to onboard existing customer to move to the Cloud since they have been used to the traditional approach and are worried about pits and falls of the Cloud, it certainly needs some patience to educate them in the right direction and we are truly confident this is difficult however not impossible.

As told to B Swaminathan