Tirzok Cloud Services

We are planning to offer Public Cloud service and Private and/or Hybrid one. Public Cloud Services enable business and individuals to conveniently utilise computing and storage resources which will ensure maximum utilisation and state-of-the-art security in a very flexible pricing model. As of now, no public cloud service exists in Bangladesh which provides full range of cloud services. But there is sufficient demand for these services as businesses and individuals are resorting to use services offered by amazon, digital-ocean etc. Businesses which are looking for developing web enabled software and wishes to use cutting edge web and data technologies; individuals who are looking to innovate; businesses in need of secure and easy to use data solution; all are our primary target customers. As the platform will evolve, more and more different services will be added and more diverse demands from businesses will be fulfilled. This will ensure continued growth.

According to a recent study performed by Grameen Phone, the most dominant Telecom Operator in Bangladesh, there are around 4,50,000 SMEs in Bangladesh, whereas less than 0.1% people are using Internet to manage their business. There are 100+ public and private universities in Bangladesh, who wish to have a local cloud platform to engage in research and development of such technologies. Meanwhile, it is also necessary to equip the professional pool with such technologies. 

To mitigate these issues, we plan to proceed with a robust public cloud platform, as well as private cloud platforms, including hybrid solutions where appropriate. We are targeting with local SMEs with application software, Enterprises with ERP & management software, Universities with POC of Cloud System and Seminars, and conferences regarding these advanced technologies. 

Currently, the current trends show about 10000+ Applications needed in SMEs per year, 20000+ domain & web hostings are required per year, 10PB+ storage required per year, 15000+ VMs required per year. Our approach is to provide these user base with superior services, and facilities. 

If the cloud service runs more than two years, it is possible to attract potential large enterprises, and even Government to use this service.

The public cloud platform will be in service to the following, but not limited to, entities:

1. SMEs who require online application software (e.g., POS) to manage and operate their business.

2. Enterprises who require online application software (e.g., ERP) to manage and operate their business.

3. Individual freelancers/entrepreneurs to host their applications.

4. Software companies.

5. Digital service providers.

6. Banks & Financial organisations (in a Hybrid model)

7. Universities, to perform their research and hosting their management platforms.

8. Students, who wish to avail new technologies with much lower cost, but highly educative environment.

9. Streaming Content Providers, who require high local bandwidth and low latency.

The local consumers of global cloud services face the following difficulties: 

1. Language barrier

2. Foreign transfer

3. Digital payment methods

4. Phone call support

Hence, we are targeting the consumers with these barriers in mind, and engaging them through the process to design the platform based on their needs. Our mission is simple, to provide customers a low cost, friendly and efficient service to manage their infrastructure and software with low latency and high speed.

Tirzok is proceeding with a full fledged Infrastructure as a Service Solution to the local SMEs and individual entrepreneurs. Most of the applications needed in the local market are required access inside the country. Hence, a local low cost public cloud service fully delivered with local requirement in mind has a significant business opportunity in Bangladesh.

Our target is to facilitate our clients with the following:

1. High speed local network connectivity via BDIX (not outbound internet traffic) to access applications/platforms supposed to be used within the country border.

2. Provide a highly available, secure and fault tolerant storage platform to the client for secure data backup, archiving and daily use.

3. Provide clients Machine Learning based forecasting & anomaly detection platforms to have digital insights in their infrastructure and business.

4. Promoting & Establishing Open Source technologies for SMEs and Enterprises.
5. On call support and services to the customers who face difficulty about using the cloud platform and managing their services. Proper consultancies are provided regarding infrastructure usage and management.

6. Enabling online ERP/application software management with a reasonable price to those who are still not using Internet for business purpose.

7. Providing digital as well as cash methods to pay for the infrastructure and application usage.

8. Engaging local Universities to research on Cloud Platforms, BigData Platforms and Distributed Systems with a proven infrastructure which is publicly serving as well as on their premises.

9. Form an efficient and high speedy CDN within the country border for supporting large amount of streaming, data backup and archiving.

10. To help developers to concentrate on their code, and leave the headache of managing a robust infrastructure on us.

Currently, we are using the following technologies:

1. OpenStack Cloud Operating System Platform

2. KVM Hypervisor

3. Ceph Distributed Storage

4. GlusterFS Distributed File Storage

5. Apache Hadoop Ecosystem (Hadoop, Solr, Spark, HBase, Kafka, Impala, Kudu, Hive, Drill, Sqoop etc.)

6. Docker & Kubernetes

7. Different SDN Controllers

8. Suricata IPS/IDS

9. Quagga Routing Engine

10. PostgreSQL, TimeScaleDB, MariaDB

11. KariosDB, ScyllaDB

12. Ansible

13. OpenShift

14. HAProxy, Keepalived, Pacemaker

15. Ovirt, etc.

These are in short the technologies used by us, in short. Such a gigantic cloud platform uses a heavily integrated software pool to operate.

Cloud Technologies can work as enablement as barrier for entry is significantly lowered. It encourages rapid prototyping and adoption of new ideas as the innovators are freed from operational headaches. Though Cloud technologies have been a mainstream success for over a decade, there is significant growth opportunities in developing countries. 

There are multiple reasons behind the slow adoption of cloud technologies in developing countries. For example language barrier, lack of access to systems capable of foreign currency payments, lack of personalised support. A huge part of the population in developing countries do not have access to paypal or credit cards. So it is impossible for them to buy cloud services from big cloud vendors. Most of these vendors also do not provide phone support for small customers. But the web based CRM is also prohibitively complex for general population. Because of this, individuals and small businesses are not going for cloud solution. In the meantime Expansive solution vendors are using their personal grasp of the market, providing lower values to the customers.

Our solution is built from the ground up with a philosophy of "A cloud Platform for the masses". We will concentrate on building market specific support systems and a more hands on approach for the customers, easy to use payment systems in local currency, and simple documentation with a strong emphasis on localisation.

In societies with vertical barrier to information, access to critical information, be it about business, health, education, becomes a difficult proposition for the general population. There are monetary and other "fees" involved for the access to information. This creates a fertile ground for the middlemen , the rent seeker and other predatory and parasitic behaviour.

One of important ways we can improve lives of individuals, small business, humanitarian activists by giving them easy to use tools for creating content and making those content public which can supplement their use of social media. To enable such practices we need innovators to solve individual problems. But most of the times, innovators with a simple yet powerful idea, gets side tracked pretty fast because of the huge undertaking needed for setting up simple web based solutions. We need innovators to think about their solution, not how to optimise their load balancer or which database backup policy should be implemented. 

Bringing easy to use cloud solutions to the general population will promote innovation that will result in increased empowerment. Predatory and parasitic behaviour will cease to be profitable.

Currently, we are not providing a full fledged cloud service in Bangladesh. But, we have started providing VPS already.

1. Currently, we are serving 25 entities with VPS, along with block storage service, automatic weekly backup and monitoring dashboard.

But, with our domain expertise, we set up a full fledged private cloud at an enterprise which is running for around 3 years. We also have the management contract of this cloud platform. Along with that, we provided private cloud solutions to two prominent universities in Bangladesh, which are actively being used for research and application management. We also provide many virtualisation solution to many enterprises, customised according to their needs.

2. In one year, we are going to serve around 200 VPS to several entities, equipped with object storage, load balancer and other easy to use cloud services.

3. In five years, we are going to serve around 10000 full fledged cloud instances with all modern cloud features like messaging service, shared filesystem service, clustering service, data processing (BigData) service, database as a service, streaming service, multi-regional data syncing and many more.

The entire solution is designed to help people of Bangladesh regarding IT infrastructure management, data storage and security. The solutions are planned carefully to cover a broader area in the local industry.

Within next year, our target is to facilitate at least 200+ SMEs with application software and cloud instance management. Within this period, we will try to establish a small but full fledged cloud service in Bangladesh, which will contain most notable cloud services applicable for the user base. Our approach is not only to do business to business, but to grow with their business. Efficient service is our motto, which will help other business to face less headache about IT infrastructure management.

Within next five years, we want to be The Cloud Platform in Bangladesh, in respect to IaaS and PaaS. Along with that, we will proceed with SaaS applications which will have impact to SMEs, Enterprises and Individuals. We would like to see ourselves as the Data Streaming Platform, the Data Analysis & Reporting Platform, and the Data Storage & Archiving Platform for any kind of workloads in Bangladesh. 

For the next year, the only barrier we face is financial. Obviously, proper marketing is required for achieving our goals, but the infrastructure is required first. 

For the next year, our target is to establish the public facing cloud platform and promote private cloud platforms to enterprises who cannot store their data outside of their premises due to Government restrictions (such as Banks). 

For the next five years, our target is to grow exponentially as the market will grow like that. According to Gartner, more than 25% increase will be observed in Asia Pacific area regarding cloud services, and in Bangladesh, that will be definitely much more than that, as at present, the cloud market here is lagging behind than other areas. Then we will require larger finances, researches on market and services, and customer needs.

All modern technology framework are just began to bloom here in Bangladesh. So, within five years, these will be practised in every organisation and eventually the market will grow. And cloud is a platform that sits pretty well as a backend of all modern data storage, data analysis and machine learning platforms.

We are growing with other area to gather budget to make the venture successful, apart from hunting for investments. Our target is to grow with the VPS platform until we receive investments for the Cloud Platform. We are providing SMEs applications like ERP, PoS, Payroll management and other applications, building analysis platform on E-commerce sites provided by us, and growing managed service activities to gather fund as much as possible by ourselves. We developed a solution for VAS providers in Bangladesh, whose sales enabled us to purchase a few servers and provide VPS. Although this solution does not have a GUI interface right now, within a short time, it will. Along with that, we are actively seeking investments, as without investment, setting up a platform like this will be very challenging.

Full Time: 13

Part Time: 9

Consultants: 4

Our team is best placed to deliver this solution because of twofold reasons.

On the technology aspect, we have a unique mixture of experts in diverse areas. From infrastructure, service design, software development to data analytics, we have experienced people in every area. Because of this unique blend, we hope to build the solution with unique features specifically designed to cater to the population we are serving. Technologically it will be bleeding edge. And our commitment to open source technology will also promote a form of communitarian process of building the solutions where the target group will always be involved by giving their feedback. Open source technologies will also promote community contributions which will be adequately credited. Because of our team's extensive experience with open source communities, we are well placed to build solution in open and collaborative manner.

On the business aspect, we have the right people who will think of this solution from a more communitarian way, so that potential innovators can be promoted. We feel our unique understanding of the cultures of a developing countries, we will be able to identify the pain points and quickly adopt to the requirements.

Currently, we are not partnering with any other organisations.

Our key customers are those who require IT services for business operations, and our value addition is to shift their expenses from CapEx to OpEx.

As IaaS will be provided, organisations can provision systems with minimal effort with varieties of Operating Systems, private networking support and other infrastructure requirements easily to deploy and manage their applications. Along with that, appropriate consultancies will be provided to best utilise the cloud services for their needs.

The cloud service can be used via an easy-to-use dashboard and the billing model will vary with customer preferences. Both digital and manual billing will be applied due to the cash flow nature within the country.

Our approach towards cloud computing is twofold. We will deploy a full fledged public cloud for general users with monthly subscription fees based on the resource allocation and usage. We will also focus on deploying Private clouds on Enterprise premises, along with managed services so that deployment charges and also an AMC can be charged. Besides, hybrid cloud establishment will empower the user to use on premise secure solution, with the ability of handling sudden bursts by leverage towards the public one. That will have a direct impact on the revenue streams. Along with that, several SaaS products are being designed for the consumer market, which will require resources from the public cloud. In that way, customers of those SaaS will indirectly contribute to the revenue of the back-end cloud platform.

We are aggressively looking for investments. But, along with that, to have a footprint, we are already working on various projects to prepare fund for deploying a cloud platform in a small scale. In this regard, we are already providing manually deployed VPS to our customers, and they will be migrated to the cloud when it is ready.

Along with that, we are going forward with large scale infrastructure management service with the same goal in mind. That empowers us to have a place in private cloud setup area.

The profound barrier that will be resolved by being selected is the problem of fund, which will enable us to deploy a small sized, but full fledged public cloud service in a single datacenter as a pilot basis. After making it run, it will be possible to gear up towards larger investments and only with such investments, a full fledged multi data centre (and also multi region) cloud service can be provided to people of Bangladesh, with sustainable business.

Partnership with the following types of companies will help us to smoothen our journey:

1. Nationwide ISPs.

2. NTTNs.

3. IIGs.

4. Colocation services.

5. Hardware Vendors.

We would like to be partnered with a promising company for initial investments, and smooth journey towards Enterprise Marketing. Along with that, several resources required to establish a modern cloud platform, like high speed bandwidth, both upstream and BDIX, plus a good number of server grade machines, network devices, data centre spaces, large IP pool, etc. We would like to be facilitated with any of these (if not all) to make the effort successful.