Outsourcing IT System As IaaS For Business Convenience

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service*) is becoming a key trend in Vietnam IT market thanks to cost advantage and maximum prevention of risks in operation. The Weekly has conducted an interview with Mr. Carlton Pringle, technology director of VietnamWorks (www.vietnamworks.com), a website providing online recruitment solutions and has been the pioneer in IaaS in Vietnam. Q: Congratulations to VietnamWorks on winning BITCup the third year. This prize tells a lot about the recognition of the biggest IT community to a recruitment website. Can you tell more about the role of IT department in the success of VietnamWorks? A: At VietnamWorks, we help jobseekers find their dream jobs and employers find the right people for their organizations. So a good IT system helps our users find jobs and candidates quickly and effectively. In this Internet era, the speed, efficiency and security contribute nearly half of your success. And we have a stable system, a high performance website and we will invest more to make it better. From GDS, I know that you are using their services. What make you decide to use GDS Data Center (DC)? VietnamWorks system was located in Singapore before. While locating our system in Singapore, most of our website traffic is from Vietnam, so the loading time was high and sometimes we had problems through international Internet connections. There were times when there were some problems with international cables, our business was affected and our customers, jobseekers were not happy. In order to serve our customers better, we decided to move our server to Vietnam to minimize all these risks and improve our site performance. When we were selecting providers, we considered two key factors – security and availability. GDS was one of the datacenters we visited. There were many choices, but I was convinced by the international standards of GDS’s services; secondly, I was impressed at the high level of their security and biometric system. We found that they can provide us all we need. Therefore, we decided to move our server from Singapore to Hanoi, with GDS DC. To me, GDS has good standard, reliable business, good infrastructure, high quality Internet backbone that guarantee a quality solution. GDS has a good position that is a Tier III Data Center with flexible IaaS. And VietnamWorks also chose the outsource solution for your IT system? We choose to use full outsourcing to get the quality and integration. Currently, we are using GDS datacenter IaaS services including rental rack, server leasing, network connections, security management, operation and support service, with all equipment and network being provided by GDS according to our requirement. This solution helps us focus our resources on the core competence – our web contents itself. Since VietnamWorks used GDS DC services, how have things changed? Now our website has highest performance ever — faster and stable. This means we can help more jobseekers find their dream jobs, and our customers find it more efficient when they use VietnamWorks to source talent for their companies. We can save people’s time while they get better results. How about GDS’ after-sales services? GDS does very well with good level of support. They support us in fixing the problem quickly. We had some trouble with spam emails, or another time with website access, director of data center (DC) contacted me to help solve the problem. GDS always did what their promised, on time and professional. How do you evaluate the efficiency of the IT full outsourcing in comparison with traditional self-operation method? Infrastructure with liability of communication, high security level and generators with big UPS. shall be very costly. Outsourcing is more efficient and has better benefit than investing money in DC infrastructure. Besides, DC service users can save IT human resource at office by utilizing skillful technicians at DC who will take care of their IT system professionally 24/24 hour all year around. In short, with outsourcing solution service users have more free hands to focus on their core business. *IaaS = Infrastructure as a Service Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis. IaaS of Global Data Service., JSC (GDS) includes not only rack space in data center, but also facility, connectivity, server, storage, operation as one stop-shop services. Some Vietnamese companies have been outsourcing IT services with IaaS.