It’s essential to research a new technology before implementing it.  You need to read the documentation and scan the blogs and forums for gotchas.  Then you need to make a plan.  But ideally you would test your plan in a test lab before implementing anything in production.

I know from experience that not all organizations have enough old hardware or extra internet connections lying around to create a proper lab environment.  Also, many IT groups are constrained for time and money.

We will be offering access to our new hosted infrastructure for companies that want access to an external lab environment with dedicated hardware.  Unlike Amazon or the other commodity cloud providers, we are primarily a services company.  So we are here to help design and implement your validation testing.  Also, test environments with multiple subnets will be much easier to implement in a dedicated hosting environment such as ours, especially if your team lacks extensive AWS experience.  All of these commodity  cloud offerings are hermetically sealed to some degree.  It is generally difficult and sometime impossible to reconfigure these platforms to meet non-standard requirements.  We offer value to clients who need more freedom to customize their environments.

I am not against public cloud services like AWS.  The cloud will certainly become the foundation of all IT services as time goes on.  However, there is a rocky path between that bright future and the current situation faced by most companies today.  There is still a lot of uncertainty about the best cloud strategies.  Microsoft, VMWare, and Rackspace are all offering  competitive cloud platforms that provide different benefits for different use cases. Most companies want to take a staged approach.  Our new offerings can help you do just that, by trying out various cloud integration scenarios without impacting production environments.

Once we have our own redundancy and high-availability in place, we will be offering more services such as private cloud hosting.  Contact us for more info at: info@aviator-it.com.

UPDATE 8/30/15: We are now offering private cloud hosting. .