In recent years, Think Solutions faced a shift in customer demands under accelerating digital transformation, with more organisations seeking flexible, outsourced IT infrastructure and as-a-service solutions.
“Over the last five years, customers' needs have become more and more complex,” according to Pedro Duarte, Think Solutions’ Sales Director. “Smaller customers want to outsource everything, while larger customers rely on us for subject matter expertise.”
To support these evolving needs, the company conceptualised Think-as-a-Service: a set of offerings covering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (allowing customers to outsource the entirety of their infrastructure management) and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (for those customers who might have a good production environment but need support for redundancy and disaster recovery).
Previously, Think Solutions hosted its private cloud infrastructure in NEXTDC's M1 data centre in Port Melbourne. However, to build Think-as-a-Service, the company needed to create physical separation of primary and secondary infrastructure; a more comprehensive footprint that ensured higher levels of resilience, all while maintaining the highest standards of security and uptime.
“It made sense to provide some geographical diversity from our client base, to allow us to build as-a-service solutions that meet high standards of resilience and availability,” said Duarte.
Additionally, with demand for cloud interconnectivity rising exponentially, Think Solutions required a seamless way to connect its customers to leading public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google.
Think Solutions decided to expand its capabilities by hosting its own infrastructure and Think-as-a-Service offerings in NEXTDC’s M2 data centre in Tullamarine. As a Tier IV-certified facility, M2 provided the perfect environment to ensure high standards of resilience and availability for Think-as-a-Service. Located near major transport and telecommunications infrastructure, M2 enables unparalleled levels of operational certainty and ecosystem proximity.
Critically, Think Solutions is also leveraging NEXTDC’s virtual interconnectivity platform, AXON, to provide fully redundant (100% geodiverse pathways), 10GB connectivity between M1 and M2 as well as as-a-Service direct connectivity to all the major cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
“AXON fits really well with our service offering,” said Duarte. “Think Solutions offers consumption-based services, and so does AXON. Customers can consume as needed, scale up and scale down based on what they’re doing at that point in time and only pay for what they use.
“Typically, during data migrations we scale up using an AXON link, then afterwards we scale it down to business as usual.”
The partnership with NEXTDC has been critical in the expansion of Think Solutions’ business and the launch of Think-as-a-Service. They are now in a competitively advantageous position of being able to continue developing and expanding innovative new services that will grow the business without the need for significant capital investment in IT infrastructure.
“NEXTDC are always in the right locations,” said Duarte. “They offer us 100% uptime in world-class facilities – our team can come into the data centre, organise a meeting, have a coffee if they need a break and use the vending machines to retrieve equipment.
“What’s more, they really support what we do as a business. We’re based in Victoria, but we have national customers, so NEXTDC’s Remote Hands service has been invaluable at times - whenever we've needed someone to attend a rack and plug in a cable, start up a server or provide other technical services.”
Additionally, in a world where auditing and cybersecurity frameworks are paramount, NEXTDC provides Think Solutions with just the right balance of robust high security and access to their kit.
“Think Solutions are at Maturity Level Three on the Essential Eight framework, so we have stringent security requirements around audit logs and records of everything that occurs on our infrastructure and on our customers’ infrastructure,” Duarte explained. “NEXTDC supports that via roles-based access, so it's really easy to gain that access in a controlled method.”
NEXTDC is also helping Think Solutions meet their sustainability targets – an increasing focus for their customer base.
“We’re always looking for new ways to improve our carbon footprint, and NEXTDC’s focus on power efficiency in their data centres helps us do that,” said Duarte. “We also love NEXTneutral, which allows us to offset all our carbon consumption in the data centre.
“Without these supports, it would be very difficult to achieve carbon neutrality in our infrastructure.”
Looking ahead, Think Solutions sees its partnership with NEXTDC as a critical component to remaining future-ready.
“Given the rapid pace at which technology is advancing, from AI to accelerated computing, Think Solutions is committed to staying ahead of these trends,” said Duarte.
“Whether it’s connecting to emerging technologies or scaling to meet new demands, we’re confident that we’re future-ready. We may not know exactly what the next big innovation will be, but with NEXTDC, we know we’re equipped to embrace it when it arrives."
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