No space is available for server cabinets, emergency generators and armour-plated doors in the new company headquarters of the WIR and IRW Group: Following the move to a listed Wilhelminian style villa, the HR and industrial services provider has all its IT requirements covered by the business cloud from Pironet NDH Datacenter. In addition to the head office in Erkrath by Düsseldorf, the ICT service provider supplies over 190 employees at more than 40 locations in Germany with business-critical applications from the cloud. Even on employees' PCs the operating system is not a conventional one, because the users also make use of the Windows environment and all the applications by means of cloud computing.
Desktop as a Service supplies office workstations from the cloud
The desks in the WIR and IRW offices today are predominantly equipped with so-called thin clients. On these, employees use their familiar Windows desktop, including Microsoft Office and Outlook. However, the software is no longer contained on the local hard disk, but comes from the cloud in the high-security data centre of Pironet NDH.
"Choosing cloud computing was not a matter of protecting a historical monument," says Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki, Managing Director of the WIR and IRW Group. "The cloud desktops make local maintenance of our PCs unnecessary, likewise the manual deployment of security patches and program updates." Users on the road and in their home office also profit from this independence. There they use a web browser to access their office Windows with all their applications, emails, addresses, deadlines and documents. "Consequently, our employees can work wherever they have an internet access," adds Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki.
Business applications draw on IT resources as Infrastructure as a Service
In addition to the employees' PC environments, Pironet NDH is also responsible for the operation of business-critical IT systems for the WIR and IRW Group. "The business cloud infrastructure in our German data centres works completely dynamically and can assign the necessary hardware resources to corporate applications as required," explains Udo Faulhaber, Managing Director of Pironet NDH Datacenter. The temping software L1 from Landwehr, the Document Management System ELO and other industry solutions which the WIR and IRW Group employs also obtain memory space and computing power dynamically from the service provider's business cloud.
IT keeps pace with the company
Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki sees the flexibility of his IT environment as the greatest advantage of the new cloud strategy: "As an HR and industrial services provider, among other things, we compensate for fluctuations in our customers' business operations. That is our job. To do so we need IT systems that keep pace with our business operations in terms of performance and costs. Cloud computing is therefore the ideal approach for us. New locations are integrated into our IT environment in a very short time. But we can also dispense with surplus IT capacities. Unused licences and oversized hardware are consequently a thing of the past."
In future IT costs will reflect actual requirements: The Group will thus pay for their employees' desktop systems per user and per month. The provision of business-critical systems with hardware resources will also be based on consumption in the form of CPU time and storage space used.
Cloud computing as part of a holistic offering
For Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki the decisive factor in selecting an outsourcing and cloud provider was the holistic nature of the offering: "Many cloud providers offer only isolated services, for example infrastructure resources. With Pironet NDH we procure all services from a single source and discuss all inquiries with our Service Manager. Pironet NDH also implements operating services which cannot yet be covered fully by cloud computing, for example for our industry solutions. Here Pironet NDH combines classic managed hosting with Infrastructure as a Service. In other words the software runs outside the cloud, but is supplied with computing power and memory from the cloud."
Desktop as a Service supplies office workstations from the cloud
The desks in the WIR and IRW offices today are predominantly equipped with so-called thin clients. On these, employees use their familiar Windows desktop, including Microsoft Office and Outlook. However, the software is no longer contained on the local hard disk, but comes from the cloud in the high-security data centre of Pironet NDH.
"Choosing cloud computing was not a matter of protecting a historical monument," says Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki, Managing Director of the WIR and IRW Group. "The cloud desktops make local maintenance of our PCs unnecessary, likewise the manual deployment of security patches and program updates." Users on the road and in their home office also profit from this independence. There they use a web browser to access their office Windows with all their applications, emails, addresses, deadlines and documents. "Consequently, our employees can work wherever they have an internet access," adds Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki.
Business applications draw on IT resources as Infrastructure as a Service
In addition to the employees' PC environments, Pironet NDH is also responsible for the operation of business-critical IT systems for the WIR and IRW Group. "The business cloud infrastructure in our German data centres works completely dynamically and can assign the necessary hardware resources to corporate applications as required," explains Udo Faulhaber, Managing Director of Pironet NDH Datacenter. The temping software L1 from Landwehr, the Document Management System ELO and other industry solutions which the WIR and IRW Group employs also obtain memory space and computing power dynamically from the service provider's business cloud.
IT keeps pace with the company
Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki sees the flexibility of his IT environment as the greatest advantage of the new cloud strategy: "As an HR and industrial services provider, among other things, we compensate for fluctuations in our customers' business operations. That is our job. To do so we need IT systems that keep pace with our business operations in terms of performance and costs. Cloud computing is therefore the ideal approach for us. New locations are integrated into our IT environment in a very short time. But we can also dispense with surplus IT capacities. Unused licences and oversized hardware are consequently a thing of the past."
In future IT costs will reflect actual requirements: The Group will thus pay for their employees' desktop systems per user and per month. The provision of business-critical systems with hardware resources will also be based on consumption in the form of CPU time and storage space used.
Cloud computing as part of a holistic offering
For Jörg-Dieter Biernetzki the decisive factor in selecting an outsourcing and cloud provider was the holistic nature of the offering: "Many cloud providers offer only isolated services, for example infrastructure resources. With Pironet NDH we procure all services from a single source and discuss all inquiries with our Service Manager. Pironet NDH also implements operating services which cannot yet be covered fully by cloud computing, for example for our industry solutions. Here Pironet NDH combines classic managed hosting with Infrastructure as a Service. In other words the software runs outside the cloud, but is supplied with computing power and memory from the cloud."
