Rackspace Launches Customer Reliability Engineering and Managed Security Services for Google Cloud Platform
London, UK – 23rd July 2018 – Rackspace today announced that it has broadened its portfolio of services for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers with the launch of its new Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) programme and Rackspace Managed Security (RMS) – Proactive Detection and Response, and RMS – Compliance Assistance for GCP. Rackspace is focused on delivering digital transformation as a service across applications, data, security and infrastructure. As part of Rackspace’s evolving relationship with Google Cloud and its ongoing investment in building services and support solutions for GCP, the new CRE and RMS offerings will provide increased resiliency and security for customers’ business-critical applications.
“Navigating the complexities of a digital transformation and understanding the impact it has on a business is challenging, so we’re focused on being the trusted advisor for customers to help guide them through each phase of this journey,” said Warren Jonas, General Manager of Managed Google Cloud Platform, EMEA, Rackspace. “Our new CRE offering provides a way for companies to pinpoint which applications matter most from a business perspective and then systematically measure and improve upon that. And with RMS and compliance assistance, we’re helping to ensure their data, applications and infrastructure are protected every step of the way. These offerings, paired with Rackspace and Google Cloud’s combined technical expertise, will make these applications more reliable and secure, and ultimately help drive greater business value.”
Rackspace CRE, one of many services in the company’s growing portfolio of GCP solutions, is ideal for customers running business critical applications that require high levels of performance and reliability. The CRE offering leverages the same principles and processes pioneered by Google Cloud, and will allow Rackspace to work with customers to assess their objectives, design, implementation and operational procedures of business-critical applications to help improve overall reliability and resiliency.
As Google Cloud’s first CRE managed service partner, the Rackspace CRE team was hand-selected by Google Cloud and has undergone extensive training with senior Google Cloud site reliability engineers (SREs). This programme, along with Rackspace’s first-hand experience in operating the world’s largest clouds, allows Rackspace CREs to lead a series of workshops designed to guide customers on how to implement SRE principles, improve the reliability of critical applications, address tradeoffs among performance, reliability and cost, and to solve key application issues. The specific content of these workshops focuses on:
- Understanding Site Reliability Engineering – Provides a detailed explanation of the SRE framework, while discussing real world examples of how SRE can be applied and the value it delivers to organisations.
- Identifying and Measuring Service Level Objects – Discusses fundamental concepts and techniques required to build a successful SRE team, why a well-defined and measured SLO is crucial to the SRE approach and where organisations should have SLOs defined. It also trains customers how to incorporate error budgeting and risk analysis into developer’s day-to-day workloads.
- Applying Operational Best Practices – Educates customers on the best way to apply processes and procedures to help ensure that their team can scale with their services by reducing toil, dealing with interrupts, being on-call, conducting incident response management and fostering a postmortem culture.
- Assessing Application Reliability – Conducts an in-depth review of how to best prioritise and implement agreed upon SLOs in areas such as software and platform architecture, capacity and scaling, development and release engineering, failures and outages, security and risk assessments, among others.
“During our recent CRE workshop, Rackspace brought a high-level of knowledge and experience to the table based on numerous retail and e-commerce engagements,” said John Anthony, CIO of Spiraledge, a leading internet retailer and healthy living company, and Rackspace customer. “We worked with Rackspace to seamlessly migrate our SwimOutlet.com brand to Google Cloud. This site is critical to the overall success of our business and Rackspace’s CRE experts have now given us the training and skills needed to ensure this site maintains an optimal level of performance and reliability.”
In addition to CRE, Rackspace announced the launch of its new RMS Proactive Detection and Response, and Compliance Assistance for GCP offerings. Together, these offerings deliver swift breach detection and remediation, helping to minimise the time cyber criminals spend in an environment and to limit overall impact to the business. With RMS, businesses can layer additional active security on GCP to detect and respond to advanced cyber threats. Rackspace utilises pre-approved actions to promptly remediate security incidents. This level of security strengthens customers’ environments beyond the operational network and infrastructure security provided by most cloud providers. It also complements the strategic planning, architectural guidance and 24x7x365 operational support available through Managed Services for Google Cloud Platform.
“Our collaboration with Rackspace has continued to evolve over the past year and together we are driving some exciting innovations that will deliver more value to our customers,” said Choon Aun Quek Head of Cloud Platform, North Central & Canada, Google. “The CRE and managed security and compliance assistance offerings for GCP ensure customers’ applications are high performing, reliable and secure. We look forward to ongoing collaboration.”
Rackspace became Google Cloud’s first Managed Service Provider partner in March 2017. Since that time, Rackspace has expanded the depth of its expertise and technical capabilities to include hundreds of Google Cloud experts to deliver managed support for GCP customers. In June 2017, Rackspace become Google’s first CRE partner, and in March 2018, Rackspace became Google’s first Managed Security Services Provider partner. This quickly evolving collaboration reflects Rackspace and Google Cloud’s shared commitment to delivering rapid innovation, high quality support and increased value to the growing number of enterprise GCP customers worldwide.
Rackspace CRE and Rackspace Managed Security Services for GCP are now available in general availability for customers worldwide.
For additional information on Rackspace CRE for GCP, please contact GoogleSales@Rackspace.com or call +44 20 8734 2600
For additional information on Rackspace Managed Security, please visit www.rackspace.com/security.
About Rackspace
Rackspace is modernizing IT in today’s multi-cloud world. By delivering IT as a service, we help customers of all industries, sizes and locations, across private and public sectors, realize the power of digital transformation without the complexity and expense of managing it on their own. Our comprehensive portfolio of managed services across applications, data, security and infrastructure on the world’s leading public and private cloud platforms enables us to provide unbiased expertise. Rackspace has been honored by Fortune, Forbes, Glassdoor and others as one of the best places to work. Learn more at www.rackspace.com
