Why we care about on-premises

There’s a chance you’ve viewed the Jidoteki website and didn’t fully understand the scope of what we solve.

To grasp what we’re doing, it’s important to understand why we do what we do.

Let’s start with a bit of history

Our experience working in IT goes back to the start of the millennium, at the cusp of the dotcom boom. We landed traditional jobs at larger corporations, and quickly realized the issues with installing, maintaining, and using enterprise software. The enterprise was unfairly under-served, despite there being magnificent small-business solutions.

Fast-forward fifteen years, and not only is this problem still present, but it’s gotten worse. The enterprise is now faced with newer challenges, such as lowering their hardware TCO, protecting their private data, and handling BYOD policies. To keep an edge, they must also adopt new approaches, such as metrics gathering and big data crunching.

Solutions

One recent solution is to move data to the cloud. It enables enterprises to utilize newer technologies while keeping their costs relatively low. The enterprise is now well served by startups and other enterprises, but there’s a sword dangling over their head.

Mo cloud, mo problems

At Unscramble, we foresaw the problems arising from the enterprise moving to the cloud.

To list a few:

• Data is now shared on physical hardware with other companies, potentially competitors.
• Bandwidth and storage costs suddenly spike, growing as the data sets grow.
• Latency between the office and cloud provider becomes a real issue.
• Cloud-based solutions often change their UI without notice, thus forcing “upgrades” without consent.
• Privacy and data security is left under the control of a third-party organization.

From our perspective, the benefits of a lower TCO don’t outweigh those problems. Everyone, for some crazy reason, seems to focus solely on the TCO.

We strongly believe security shouldn’t be an after-thought, and for many businesses, these cloud alternatives are a deal-breaker.

So, are we back to square one?

Our idea

We’ve been brewing this idea for over three years now, and it’s simply this:

Rather than bring the enterprise to the cloud, what if we brought the cloud to the enterprise?

There’s a multitude of amazing cloud-based services out there, many which could potentially solve serious enterprise problems, but due to the issues listed above, the enterprise will never use them.

Some companies have opted to deploy their SaaS services to cloud providers such as AWS, thus providing a dedicated (fake) on-premises solution. For us, this is a less than adequate band-aid solution which doesn’t solve the real problems.

Our solution

Through Jidoteki as a managed service:

• Package cloud-based services as tiny virtual appliances and/or hardware disk images.
• Build read-only, small footprint, memory-based, updateable systems.
• Ensure they can be updated entirely offline, on-demand, without requiring internet access.
• Focus on security and reliability through proven technology (not containers).
• Enable the enterprise to keep full control of their private data, behind their corporate firewall, on-premises (not on AWS).
• Reduce bandwidth costs by using binary delta updates, with full rollback and an atomic update process.
• The ability to deploy to tiny hardware devices such as the Raspberry Pi.

That is what we do. Having worked in the enterprise, we know the difficulty of being handcuffed to bad software, and we’re out to solve that - the correct way.

If you’re currently working in an enterprise, we feel your pain. Please contact us and let us know which cloud services you’d love to use on-premises.

We’ve already deployed dozens of production-ready solutions, so if you’re a SaaS provider with a great cloud-based solution, please contact us so we can help you build the solution you need.