Design and Manage SaaS/eCommerce Operations

Online Services and SaaS Providers Need More Than an App to Succeed

Many emerging businesses now require a secure, reliable and scalable IT infrastructure dedicated to delivering online services to their customers. These business models - including e-commerce sites, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS or ASPs) and other online services - typically require the operation of a 24 x 7 data center in a co-location facility. These companies are often built on marketing and software development expertise, but lack the specialized skills required to design, build and operate a robust data center. They need IT infrastructure design and management skills. These skills are quite different from those needed for product engineering or internal IT.

The Consequences of Getting it Wrong

Mistakes made in locating and designing a data center can be extremely difficult and expensive to correct downstream. For example, moving a data center can take months of staff effort and redundant expenses. Having an unreliable, non-scalable or insecure service delivery infrastructure can result in customer dissatisfaction and loss of reputation. Understanding all the costs upfront is essential to building a realistic business model. There are ample incentives to get it right the first time.

Design and Management Services from Moyo Group

Moyo Group has many years of experience designing and operating co-location data centers for emerging and mid-sized companies - from 10 servers to hundreds of servers. As key members of the Corio founding team (CORIO, acquired by IBM in 2005), we helped pioneer the SaaS/ASP model. We built and managed a world class data center for application delivery in the process. Now we help our customers who operate online services or SaaS companies in these distinct ways:

Develop Business Requirements

  • Develop customer Service Level Agreements, refine the service cost model and document requirements for bid

Select a Co-Location or Managed Services Facility

  • Market knowledge of vendor offerings, on-site vendor visits and assessments, pricing negotiations

Data Center Design

  • Understand application scalability factors and develop application hosting architecture requirements
  • Specify technology stack and design technical architecture
  • Select technology components: servers, network, security, storage
  • Capacity planning
  • Design test plan
  • Create project plan & resource plan for build-out
  • Budgeting

Data Center Build-out or Move

  • Architecture Design
  • Risk assessment (downtime)
  • Configure network, security, servers, monitoring, etc.
  • Test the platform per test plan
  • Detailed backout plan (move)
  • Assist in staffing & training ongoing support roles
  • Implement support procedures
  • Manage project on-time and on-budget

Data Center Management (the hidden costs)

  • Develop Standard Operating Procedures:
  • Change Management
  • Incident Management & Root Cause Analysis
  • Backup & Recovery Management, Disaster Recovery
  • Capacity Management (CPU, Memory, Storage, Bandwidth)
  • High Availability Management
  • Monitoring and Environment management processes
  • Site failover
  • Develop staffing model, roles & responsibilities
  • Provide ongoing leadership or periodic re-assessments
  • Vendor management

Assessment of Existing Operations

  • Review technical architecture
  • Perform security audit
  • Compliance audit preparation
  • Review operational roles and performers
  • Review operational procedures
  • Review vendors and cost basis
  • Recommendations for improvement
  • Review infrastructure bottlenecks
  • Scalability review