If you were going to set up a business in the medieval age – an era of war and magic – you would be well-advised to protect it against any likely environmental threats. Like black-scaled, fire-belching, magic-oozing dragons.

In the digital age, there are subtler but equally dangerous threats on the horizon. The modern business is so reliant on its IT systems and data, that if they’re shut down for any length of time the result isn’t pretty. Businesses need to make sure they’re prepared – so why aren’t all doing it?

Technology that is designed to win, serve and retain customers is what makes the difference between the good and the great.

Your e-commerce platform, your website, your customer portal, these customer-facing applications are increasingly becoming the main business driver and differentiator in the software revolution.

MSP moves to strengthen Amazon Web Services and DevOps expertise

Managed services provider (MSP) Claranet has acquired UK-based AWS specialist Bashton Limited. The acquisition, which follows and complements the acquisitions Claranet made last year of LinuxIT and Techgate in the UK, will enable Claranet to further develop its DevOps capabilities and to better support customers’ complicated and diverse applications on public cloud infrastructure.

Established in 2004 and based in Warrington, Bashton is focused on helping customers run mission critical dynamic web applications on AWS infrastructure. The company, which works primarily with retail and media customers, has developed expertise which allows the rapid creation of environments within AWS. The company also has considerable expertise in DevOps tooling, which enables customers to rapidly deploy code updates into their web application, as well as, monitor and improve performance. Bashton’s annual revenues are £1.2 million and the company counts ITV, Odeon, BBC Worldwide, Liverpool Football Club, made.com and Virgin Holidays amongst its customers.

Bashton bolsters Claranet’s ability to deliver managed application hosting services on any combination of private and public cloud infrastructure. The expanded Claranet Group has annual revenues of £165 million, over 1,000 staff and over 5,500 customers in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

Michel Robert, Claranet UK’s Managing Director, commented:

Bashton was a natural company to join Claranet and follows a number of strategically-important acquisitions we have made in the past year across Europe to enhance our public cloud capabilities. The development of managed services on third-party clouds is a key focus for Claranet, and the skills and experience brought by Bashton go a long way to helping us to manage more complex applications in these environments.

As cloud adoption increases, the real value we can add as a managed services provider is in our expertise, tooling and automation capabilities, such as those offered by Bashton. We are therefore focused on further developing our advanced hosting capabilities to streamline our customers’ operations and underpin the evolution of our managed application hosting services.”

Sam Bashton, Bashton’s Founder and Director, added:

Claranet’s application-centric approach to combining hosting and networking services, including its Cloud Connect service into AWS, demonstrates a solid understanding of the challenges faced by businesses today. I am very confident that Bashton customers will benefit from Claranet’s capabilities. I’m especially pleased to be joining Claranet to help strengthen and contribute to the future development of its public cloud capabilities.”

Organisations are realising that the rise of the DevOps philosophy may be the best way to address numerous competitive challenges that businesses face.

DevOps doesn’t just apply to start-ups and web operations. You can create a DevOps atmosphere in any organisation.

IT is changing

With traditional approaches to IT, organisations do not look to bridge the gap between development and operations teams. This approach to IT tends to be reactive and manual in nature rather than being integrated and proactively focused. Increasingly, maintaining such a practice is impacting on the cost, agility, maintainability and availability of systems, which can ultimately impact on the reputation of the organisation.

Enter DevOps