In this week’s Voices of the Industry, Andrew Schaap, Senior Vice President of Sales, Digital Realty, discusses the “real” Hybrid cloud.
The biologist’s definition of a hybrid: “The offspring of two plants or animals of different species or varieties, such as a mule,” always makes me chuckle. So given the definition, is IT’s holy grail, the hybrid cloud, really such an odd-looking, hard-working creature? The answer is, well, yes.
Andrew Schaap, Senior Vice President of Sales Digital Realty
Cloud Definitions and Delusions
Hybrids are created to optimize the most desirable traits of both parents. Hence, the hybrid cloud is intended to combine the security and autonomy of a dedicated, single-tenant data center space with the availability, scalability and extraordinary array of services offered by public cloud providers. The “private” cloud is a kind of specialized varietal—a scalable, multi-tenant computing environment that lives behind a corporate firewall and gives client workgroups the ability to provision virtual infrastructure and applications as needed and on demand. Well designed and deployed, your hybrid cloud should be not only a tireless workhorse, but a speed-of-light runner, that is cheap to maintain, as well. Nourished by OPEX, it delivers high ROI at a relatively low TCO.
That’s the pie-in-sky version.
The Distance between Promise and Reality
Down here on earth, the planet where every cloud is born and ultimately lives, things look a little different. Yes, more than 80% of enterprises are already committed to a multi-cloud IT infrastructure. And yes, the As-A-Service concept is a powerful facilitator of cloud computing. The hard part is making it all work together in the here and now. What are some of the common barriers to the success of hybrid clouds?
• The sky-high cost of high-volume public cloud computing
• The IT challenges of spinning up private clouds
• The technical challenges of cloud interconnection
• The barriers to enabling partner technologies within the client ecosystem
• The economic and technical costs of scaling your cloud-dependent business
Solving for Cloud Success
Digital Realty is well positioned to address and solve for these challenges. Our global footprint enables us to provide a cloud platform that spans the earth. It means we have done and now do business with the world’s largest ecosystem of network, hardware and software solution vendors. The breadth and quality of our real estate portfolio gives us a low cost of capital. And we’ve been investing those resources to create real solutions to the technical and economic hard parts of the cloud revolution.
Improving the user experience
Through acquisition as well as innovation, we’ve been working hard to create new, easier and vendor-agnostic ways to provision, connect, secure, and scale hybrid cloud deployments. The goal—and the achievement–of these investments is to improve the user experience, whether the user works in IT or on the business side of the aisle. Think of it as the difference between carving on a stone tablet and using Photoshop. I truly believe our efforts are giving birth to the next big thing.
Join the Conversation
It’s almost time for us to start sharing these breakthroughs with the rest of the world. For us, the big reveal begins the third week of September, at MarketplaceLIVE in New York City. For more than a decade, this event has convened the community of cloud and internet stakeholders to share insights and cross-pollinate ideas. This year’s event is called Learning from Unexpected Places—a title that suits the boundary-crossing innovations we’ll start to roll out there. We invite everyone with an interest in a faster, safer, more affordable hybrid cloud to join this industry-wide discussion on September 22, 2016.
Submitted by Andrew Schaap, Senior Vice President of Sales Digital Realty. To learn more about the Marketplace Live and other events visit the Data Center Frontier Data Center Industry Events Calendar.
