Cascadeo Helps Enterprises Quickly and Effectively Move Workloads and Applications to the Cloud with AWS

Comprised of expert technologists with decades of experience, the team at Cascadeo is familiar with the challenges enterprises face as they seek to modernize and use technology to drive business outcomes. Since its founding, Cascadeo has devoted its mission to helping enterprises successfully build an automation-focused technology footprint. Given that many of its clients have on-premises footprints but are also looking to take advantage of the cloud, Cascadeo has tailored its business model to focus on professional services and cloud managed services.

The company's primary goal? Helping enterprises to avoid common migration pain points and to optimize cloud deployments more seamlessly.

“Cloud done wrong yields, at best, parity with legacy IT deployments and puts enterprises at a disadvantage,” says Jared Reimer, Cascadeo’s founder and chief executive officer. “Most failed cloud migrations were set up to fail by trying to reproduce the same systems and operational processes in the cloud that were successful outside of the cloud. We’ve found that we can help enterprises take the right approach and deploy well-architected, cloud-native solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS) better, faster, and cheaper. By leveraging native AWS services, like AWS CloudFormation and AWS Lambda, as well as third-party API orchestration, we can overcome the traditional 'lift-and-shift' challenges for migrating an existing footprint to AWS.”

To-date, Cascadeo has completed hundreds of cloud client engagements. "We do not offer cloud resale; instead, we focus exclusively on providing professional services and continuing to help enterprises progress in their cloud journey, at their pace, through our managed and professional services offerings,” says Reimer.

As one of the original AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partners to pass the third-party audit in 2015, Cascadeo is an innovator in the next-generation MSP space. The company continues to evolve its cloud managed services practice. Automation is at the heart of Cascadeo’s MSP practice, offerings, and philosophy “We’re adding new solutions and features to our AWS MSP practice and platform over time,” says Reimer. “We‘ve focused on automating as many processes as possible and extending our MSP platform to support key integrations.”

Cascadeo.io, the company’s software as a service (SaaS)-based cloud managed services offering, leverages automation to rapidly connect to customer cloud accounts and deploy a CMI Virtual Appliance into cloud environments. The appliance streams information back to the cascadeo.io SaaS platform securely over SSL. Because of its high level of automation and deployment model, Cascadeo can offer its platform to customers starting a low, flat monthly price point.

The Cascadeo team’s goal is to empower customers to use the tools they prefer and to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tooling, powered by AWS, to augment the work done by Cascadeo cloud engineers who are available 24x7. “We are constantly evolving our AIOps tooling and adding new services and integrations to our platform,” says Reimer.

Developing strong partnerships and integrations with companies offering solutions that enhance cascadeo.io’s value proposition is key to Cascadeo’s mission. Recently, the company began working with NetApp to help enterprises take advantage of the automated deployment of well-architected reference solutions for Windows workloads, monitored and maintained through cascadeo.io, at a minimal cost.

Cascadeo found that one of the common pain points enterprises face is migrating and deploying Windows-based applications on the cloud.

To help solve this pain point for customers using automation, Cascadeo turned to NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for AWS, a fully managed, consumption-based cloud data service based on NetApp's ONTAP® enterprise data management software. Cloud Volumes Service for AWS helps enterprises move workloads and applications to the cloud and manage them with ease. It removes obstacles such as refactoring and rearchitecting so that enterprises can move more file-based applications to the cloud. It provides a solution for shared storage of Windows Server for AWS without all the overhead and administration involved with an in-house solution.

Example: Connecting new data sources and output targets within Cascadeo.io

“We asked ourselves, how can we help enterprises quickly and painlessly deploy NetApp Cloud Volumes Service Windows workloads to AWS in a repeatable, fully automated fashion?” says Reimer. The company automated the deployment of Cloud Volumes Service for AWS as part of a larger AWS CloudFormation-driven solution framework.

Automations are used to create a volume and connect it to a hardened, well-architected Windows workload on AWS. The storage volumes are delivered as a cloud service by NetApp to a user’s Windows compute instances. While NetApp is operationally responsible for durable, high-performance cloud file storage, Cascadeo supports managed operations for the infrastructure and application workload using the cascadeo.io platform. Cascadeo can deploy tools automatically via automation-driven automation to reduce operations from weeks to minutes. With the power of the NetApp and cascadeo.io integration, Cascadeo can deploy a complete, production-ready Windows and NetApp implementation on AWS with live managed service support on the same day a client requests it.

Diagram: The Cascadeo and NetApp CVS QuickStart on AWS

Cascadeo continues to evolve its integration with NetApp to help enterprises drive new insights and value from their deployments. “We’ve recently extended our platform to support and collect metrics and data from NetApp and AWS CloudWatch. We can then run advanced analysis on the data and go back to our managed service customers and provide deeper insights into usage,” says Reimer.

“Within the NetApp ecosystem, we have many companies somewhat stuck on premises looking to migrate legacy workloads to the cloud,” says Delya Jansen, NetApp’s cloud-first partner program lead. “We integrated with AWS to help drive faster, more seamless migrations and cloud-native deployments of NetApp technology on AWS. When we discovered Cascadeo, we found a company intimately familiar with our cloud product offerings. We felt there was a massive opportunity to work together and help legacy IT teams within our customer base begin to embrace the cloud and speed up development.”

Together, Cascadeo and NetApp are helping enterprise customers embrace the more transformational elements of the cloud—such as automation, serverless technology, AI/ML, and DevSecOps—while leveraging NetApp’s best-in-breed Data ONTAP technology. “By combining our areas of expertise and learnings from many enterprise engagements, we can help enterprises get complex workloads, like Windows applications, up-and-running on AWS quickly and drive better returns on investment with cloud-native solutions,” says Reimer.

Cascadeo and NetApp’s work on AWS is helping companies empower digital transformation worldwide. Take Globe Telecom, a major provider of telecommunications and managed IT security services in the Philippines, for example. As one of the biggest AWS users in the region, Globe Business aims to help Philippine enterprises to successfully embark on their own cloud transformation journey.

With Cascadeo as a technology and fulfillment partner and NetApp as the provider of fully managed file cloud storage services, Globe Business has become a trusted storage partner for enterprises. This relationship provides best-of-breed technology, engineering, and operations under one roof—serving the Philippine enterprise market with a complete suite of cloud solutions.