Providing industry-leading cloud services and IT solutions with a personalized touch—Otava

Every day, more advanced technologies emerge across the business landscape. They bring disruption and innovation that continues to power growth. Over the past few years, cloud service providers have helped businesses transform their wide-ranging processes. Cloud solutions have quickly matured and are becoming mainstream.

Today’s businesses increasingly rely on cloud services to support infrastructure so as to increase performance, scalability, flexibility, innovation, and cost efficiencies.

The global pandemic has accelerated digital transformation. Over 90% of organizations note cloud usage has Increased due to COVID-19 to support remote work, meet the demand for personalized customer experiences, and support system reliability. By 2026, industry analysts and experts predict that public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all IT spending—up from 17% in 2021.

As more and more IT systems and services are externalized, making sure you pick the right cloud providers has become critical to long-term success. Deciding to move to a cloud service provider can be an overwhelming process. Not only does it affect your company’s bottom line, but you may have security concerns, worries regarding downtime, and a limited understanding of the impact it will have on your existing employees. You may worry about the location of the servers and what happens to all your applications and data if they crash.

While these concerns are valid, they shouldn’t discourage you from pursuing your cloud services goals. Instead, shift your immediate plans to selecting the right provider. The right partner can allay your fears and put your organization in line to reap significant benefits.

If you are to choose a cloud service provider for your organization, look no further than Otava. Otava is a global leader of secure, compliant hybrid cloud and IT solutions for service providers, channel partners, and enterprise clients. Their network of 12 data centers and cloud nodes protects mission-critical applications to ensure they are always available, secure, and comply with government and industry regulations. Backed by independent HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 audits, Otava empowers the possibilities for companies needing a strategic IT partner.

In conversation with Cyndi Lyon, the Senior Vice President of Product, Marketing, and Business Strategy at Otava.

Q. How does Otava Cloud, powered by VMware, help enterprises be innovative?

Otava Cloud, powered by VMware, offers businesses an efficient and straightforward way to create innovation and transformation in today’s data-sensitive environments. Our solutions take the complexity out of migrating to and managing cloud infrastructure. And to complement the cloud services, Otava offers best-of-breed backup and continuity solutions that protect customers’ data. Because our solutions are complete, simple, flexible, and seamless to manage, we help customers quickly become more agile and scalable. Ultimately, our cloud services help them speed up time to revenue and control costs in today’s unpredictable and changing markets.

Q. How do Otava Business Continuity Services work?

Otava’s Business Continuity Services support our customers’ ability to maintain optimum performance levels even when faced with potential disruptive incidents. These solutions are a natural complement to our hybrid cloud services. Otava’s data protection portfolio is multifaceted and includes an array of enterprise-grade cloud disaster recovery and backup solutions that simplify the complexity associated with planning, building, and maintaining secondary and tertiary sites. Our solutions are backed by the leading data protection and business continuity software vendors, including VMware, Veeam, Zerto, Actifio and more, so that our customers receive world-class technology and support.

We have more than 30 certified engineers on staff. Otava is a Zerto Gold CSP partner, a Platinum Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partner, and VMware Cloud Verified and Disaster Recovery Validated. We also offer our customers the choice of self-managed or Otava-managed solutions to have the right level of control for their businesses.

Q. How do you get an understanding of what the customer’s needs are?

Otava actively listens to customers to get an understanding of their needs. We get to know each customer holistically so that we can apply our own experience and expertise to solve their challenges. We promote communication with our customers through our customer advisory board, which allows us to talk through current issues, priorities, and needs. Because customer feedback is vital in guiding our path forward, we are driven to ask lots of questions, dig deep, and keep the lines of communication flowing between our team and our customers.

Q. When working with many customers, it’s tricky to deliver excellent service to all of them. How do you prioritize different customer needs?

Otava is a hybrid and multi-cloud solutions leader, empowering its customers to reach their full potential. All businesses have to prioritize a range of different customer needs. For example, our enterprise customers may need help with a project migration or troubleshooting. Our approach at Otava relies on listening to our customers. We prioritize solutions by understanding where each customer is and seeing it from their position. Something that may not seem obviously urgent to us may be urgent to our customers. Engaging our team is the key to understanding our customers’ challenges. In fact, Otava differentiates itself by bringing the right people to the table to have in-depth conversations with the customer.

Q. When was a time you had to balance the customer’s needs with the needs of the business? How did you approach the situation? What were your actions? What was the result?

Otava believes in winning together, it’s even one of our core values. Our win together approach means that we look for mutual benefit for all involved parties. We make sure that our solutions create the maximum benefit for our customers, which means they are suitable for our business as well.

Take, for example, one customer with very high security and compliance requirements. Recently they came to us with an urgent, real-time request for something that Otava didn’t currently offer. We took a two-part approach to ensure success, both now and later, solving the problem. First, we worked with the customer to identify what was immediately necessary to meet the security and compliance requirements needs. Then we made sure that our business needs were equally being met from a long-term serviceability standpoint. We created a short-term solution that we transitioned into a permanent service that we now offer to our other customers. This process allowed us to help them resolve their immediate compliance gap while continuing our ongoing support. Thanks to our people-orchestrated and service-oriented approach, we solved the urgent challenge and built an even stronger customer relationship that extended to last for years to come.

Q. Tell me about a time when you put the customer first, regardless of what peers or management directed. What was the outcome?

At Otava we put people first. Our entire approach is built around empowering our people and our customers. It is simply the way we do business.

We believe that if something is suitable for the customer and right for our people, it is ideal for our business. For example, Otava has a long-standing customer that was recently experiencing service disruptions caused by a third party. As the infrastructure provider, we were put in the middle of the customer’s issue. Although it was another provider’s disruption, Otava knew it could help solve the problem by working with the third party to reconstruct and design a new solution. This is just one of the countless examples of how our team goes above and beyond to help our customers in the spirit of partnership, teamwork, and success.

Guiding Otava to provide industry-leading cloud service solutions

Cyndi Lyon is the SVP of Product, Marketing, and Business Strategy at Otava. She is a customer experience, service delivery, and operations trailblazer focusing on process improvement and organizational development.

In her 25 years of experience, she’s impacted everything from high-tech client outcomes and deployments to city planning. Leading Product, Marketing, and Business Strategy, she is the champion of Otava’s clients’ end-to-end journeys. She manages marketing and communications, product management, platform development, and customer success metrics with one goal in mind: to create meaningful and valuable customer experiences.