Q&A With Nathan Harman, CEO of Zettagrid
Q&A with Nathan Harman, CEO of Zettagrid
The Zettagrid journey was started in 2010 in Australia as a basic VPS provider. Since then, Zettagrid’s product range and customer base has grown significantly. In 2017, Zettagrid expanded into Indonesia and now has 5 availability zones over 13 data centers across Australia and South East Asia. Behind this successful story is the CEO of Zettagrid, Nathan Harman. Last month, Nathan visited the Zettagrid Indonesia office and we had an opportunity to interview him about how he and his team built Zettagrid from 2010 until now.
What inspired you and your team to create Zettagrid?
We love the idea of new service/billing model and thought it will be fun to create this. We also had a lot of assets and capability that already available in the business necessary to create a cloud business such as; a business Internet Service Provider (ISP), data center space, virtualisation expertise in house, and absolutely spare capital to buy some infrastructure and experiment. We also ran an online business which called mBox that made us more confident to create Zettagrid. This has proved correct with the company expanding at fantastic rate.
What’s your aim in creating Zettagrid?
We want to create something that would be good for businesses and help our customers by simplifying their cloud experience. Perhaps we could quickly grow our services globally.
What makes Zettagrid different among the other competitors?
What makes us different is the automation that we put in to simplifying the service for the customer. From all others element that we have, I think the automation itself that makes us unique.
What was the story behind tagline “Simplify your cloud experience”?
The cloud experience is typically complex. The products, services, administration and even the billing are complex. Our mindset is that this complexity can cause frustration and prevents customers from getting the true benefit of cloud. You will find that each of our cloud services are simple to use and our billing is fixed and so you don’t get any bill shock like other providers.
In Indonesia, we have already started to move to Industry 4.0. What do you think about the role of cloud computing in supporting Indonesia 4.0 especially for enterprises?
A company needs to be more agile today to respond the changes to achieve its businesses objectives. Using cloud computing is one part of making sure that this agility is embedded in a business. It is also helps a company to match its revenue and expenses by only acquiring capacity as required.
Many people are still wondering about the safety of cloud computing, how can you say that Zettagrid is safety?
Since everyone is concerned about security in Zettagrid, it means that we really pay attention to security. Moreover, we take it seriously and make sure that our security levels are very high. As it turns out this is higher than most companies internal security. Now that we are a bigger company lots of bad actors try to breach our business, so we have a track record of lots of people trying to hack us and as the result nobody succeeding to do it as we are constantly improving our system security.