Welcome to another interview by Website Planet. Bringing you insights on how the best companies are solving the current challenges in their industry, and how they are planning ahead for the future.
Tim Timrawi, Founder and CEO of Sharktech, joined me to discuss the problems many small businesses are facing with hyperscale cloud services like AWS, Azure, and GCP, which include hidden costs, extreme complexity, and lack of support, and why building your own infrastructure is often desirable, but it can be yet another trap.
We then looked at how Sharktech enables its clients to get all the benefits of the cloud without hiring a DevOps team while guaranteeing 50% cost savings with full transparency and full data ownership.
Meet Sharktech
Sharktech is an alternative cloud provider with over two decades of experience in highly secure, customizable, and reliable infrastructure services and over 1000 clients worldwide.
Tim started the business in 2001 with a unique, market-first DDoS-protected hosting solution. The company’s quick commercial success enabled it to invest in continuous growth and robustness of its infrastructure and network offerings.
Today, Sharktech provides traditional and advanced, open-standard cloud infrastructure to businesses in 73 countries. Their clients range from individuals who tend to buy Virtualized or Bare Metal servers to Enterprises with advanced cloud setups.
Sharktech serves clients worldwide out of 5 locations: Los Angeles, Las Vegas (added in 2024), Denver, Chicago, and Amsterdam. Each data center has highly optimized networking with low latency and 100+ Gbit bandwidth. It allows Sharktech to provide every product with a complementary 60 Gbit DDoS protection that can be extended to 1000 Gbit. They spend a lot of time and effort to ensure high uptime, and their 6 nines (99.9999%) historic cloud uptime is among the 0.1% of the top providers.
The open standard nature of Sharktech’s offerings enables clients to regain control of their data, avoid being locked to proprietary tech stacks, and run applications cost-effectively.
What unique challenges are people in your industry facing right now?
Today the infrastructure market is dominated by hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. They are a great choice for large enterprises with big IT and admin teams. However, many other participants find using hyperscale services challenging.
Large enterprises spend millions on their cloud infrastructure, and at that level, they get all the personalization and support they require. For everybody else, it’s a vending machine situation – if you can figure it out on your own, good. Otherwise, good luck, no one will help you.
Unfortunately, even understanding the ecosystem and the extremely wide range of options is difficult. Unpleasant surprises in monthly invoices due to the lack of billing transparency are very common. Add to that how many companies find themselves locked either in the technology stack, sheer egress costs (the cost of downloading their own data from the cloud), or both. They quickly realize that their cloud costs are unreasonably high, but they cannot leave or do anything about it. Security is another big concern. In hyperscalers’ cloud environments, clients have to rely on the provider to protect their data, but recent breaches and data leaks show that it’s very dangerous to give all the keys to the castle to a single provider.
📉 Recent High-Profile Companies Data Breaches
At the beginning of March 2024, American Express customers were informed that their names, account numbers, and card details may have been compromised because of a data breach.
Still, in March 2024, Fujitsu confirmed that malware affected their corporate network.
Roku, a television streaming platform, was the victim of a cyber attack that affected 15,000 account holders. Roku representatives said that hackers had “likely obtained certain usernames and passwords of consumers from third-party sources.”
These examples clearly show that over-reliance on a single provider for data storage, software, or critical services may cause significant vulnerabilities. Diversifying providers, implementing robust security measures, and maintaining vigilance are essential to mitigate the risks of large-scale data breaches and leaks.
💡 Sharktech, on the other hand, offers open standard infrastructure solutions (both public and managed private) that do not lock clients in and provide ample room for maneuvering.
Our clients’ data is their own, and we respect it.
Sharktech’s products are also powerful but have a simple and intuitive interface that’s easy to figure out. This shortens the learning curve and frees companies from the need to invest excessively in training additional IT staff. Still, Tim says, “If our clients need help, they should have a phone number to dial. We provide personalized support to each one whether they have a simple question or a technical issue requiring a quick fix.”
✅ Sharktech guarantees at least 50% cost savings compared to similar solutions from hyperscale cloud providers and provides an advanced cloud technology stack that’s easy to use, with a transparent billing model and no surprises.
How effective are the current methods for solving these issues?
More and more businesses realize that hyperscale cloud is not the answer they were looking for and are beginning to look for alternative cloud solutions or even cloud repatriation (moving workloads back to on-premises or a data center-hosted infrastructure).
However, building your own cloud infrastructure requires expertise in system administration, networking, scripting and automation, cloud and containerization, CI/CD and monitoring, security and compliance, and more.
Moving back to a private environment is advantageous from the security, control, and financial points of view but challenging for companies without big IT and admin teams.
Those who attempt to build their own private environments without external help often find themselves swamped with issues they are unable to resolve. They end up with a hybrid environment that combines costly public services and malfunctioning private infrastructure, neither of which works as desired.
In your opinion, what’s a better way to fix these issues?
Besides the Public Cloud which is ready-made and provisioned instantly, Sharktech offers Private, fully isolated solutions custom-built to each client’s requirements.
With Sharktech Private Cloud, clients get all the benefits of cloud in the modern understanding of the term while retaining the privacy, control, security, and cost-effectiveness of a standalone setup. Plus, Sharktech’s team has 20 years of expertise providing infrastructure solutions, so clients do not have to worry about building it or migrating their data on their own.
We also deliver private setups already fully operational and help maintain them along the way so our clients can reap all the benefits of the cloud without hiring a large team of infrastructure and DevOps experts.
Looking ahead 5 to 10 years, what types of infrastructure will prevail?
Given the current trends, we believe that in 5 to 10 years, the majority of businesses will adopt hybrid infrastructure where the majority of tasks and computations are handled in a hosted, private environment with Public Cloud being an on-demand extension of it.
Another major trend we see is for Edge computing, where smaller private environments are deployed in close proximity to where the data is created. This enables immediate data processing and removes the need to transport crude data in large amounts to a centralized facility.
💡Sharktech is well-positioned for the increasing demand for Edge deployments, as we already have the necessary blueprints for cloud environments of various sizes and are able to deploy them in a very short time.
Learn from Sharktech
To stay up to date on modern infrastructure trends and new developments, follow and subscribe to Sharktech’s LinkedIn and X (ex-Twitter) accounts. They regularly share updates and insights from their team.
For more technical details, check Sharktech’s blog, where you will find overviews and insights into various technologies and infrastructures.
Website: sharktech.net
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/sharktech
X: x.com/sharktechnet
Bethenny eats, sleeps, and breathes digital marketing. She helps clients take charge of brand awareness and create lead generation strategies via a number of marketing channels, including email, social media, SEO, and content. When not a marketing superwoman, you can find her playing with her three dogs on her five-acre property, or planting yummy treats in her vegetable garden. (She is also a bit of a Real Housewives junky, #guiltypleasure!)
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