Sentinel began its CloudSelect initiative in 2011 by forming an internal committee to decide how to go to market with a provider-type cloud offering. The company built a platform based around what its customers and market would consume the most, while augmenting it with other services they had the ability to resell.

"We took a look at options to partner (with other vendors) to resell other cloud services and where some of our strategic vendors were heading," said Keblusek. "It made a lot of sense to go ahead and build a platform where we could offer tighter SLAs to our customers with some of the things we were already doing."

Although vendors such as Cisco and EMC are pushing channel partners to resell their cloud services or those of another vendor, those same vendors also have programs that encourage solution providers to build their own cloud services, said Keblusek. To build its own portfolio, Sentinel has been a member of multiple cloud provider programs such as those of Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, NetApp and Symantec.

Keblusek says his approach is to look at how his customers want to monetize their IT business and consumer technolgy to determine what approach makes the most sense up front.

"We talk to the customer and determine if it's a cloud purchase or more of a premise-base sell. If it's just a managed services play where they need to overlay some managed services on what they already have, or is it some sort of a hybrid? … That tells us whether they want anything from traditional private cloud all the way to a fully managed CloudSelect data center," he said.

As a key step in the process of creating its own cloud, Sentinel needed to find a data center provider in which to put cloud services. Although Sentinel had the ability to possibly foster a data center on its own premises, it knew demand would eventually exceed what it would be able to offer in-house.

"We were looking for a provider we could grow with and would have critical uptime that we need and has multiple options for data centers," said Keblusek.

Sentinel selected Digital Realty, which owns more than 100 data centers worldwide and could give the solution provider the footprint it needed to expand overtime.

"It makes a lot of sense to partner with someone like Digital [Realty], so we didn’t have to get into the data center facilities business … we already knew we had someone we could lean on," he said.

Establishing your own cloud drives profitability, creates new opportunities and drives an organization to become a better company for its customers. For example, many customers seek CloudSelect for compliance reasons, so Sentinel has hired attorneys and consultants, which has been crucial to its success in building customized CloudSelect solutions.

"So whether you need PCI compliance, HIPAA compliance, even from some type of regulatory requirement, we're able to offer those and onboard a customer in our cloud who will be compliant day one," said Keblusek. "It's really driven us to be a better organization."

Once a successful cloud is up and running, the work doesn't stop there.

"It's a constant evolution," said Keblusek. "It's taking a look at our offers and really looking at how do we bring them to the next level ... Customers do see this as a real benefit and differentiator for them and I don't see it slowing down anytime soon."