It’s 2018, and working with hybrid cloud solutions has never been more popular. Organizations across the board are looking for ways to become more efficient, increase capabilities around scale, and improve their overall economics. Here’s the reality, as the barrier into cloud becomes easier to overcome, organizations across all sizes and vertical will look to hybrid as a means to create competitive advantages.
If you’re not yet connecting your data center into a hybrid cloud ecosystem, maybe this is the year you start that project. “As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organizations will shift toward more industrialized, less-tailored options,” said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner. “Organizations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimize costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced environment.”
Here’s the big factor: Gartner recently said that by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.
As Gartner points out, cloud compute services are expected to grow from $23.3 billion in 2016 to reach $68.4 billion in 2020. Spending on colocation and hosting is also expected to increase, from $53.9 billion in 2016 to $74.5 billion in 2020.
Moving forward, hybrid cloud solutions are experiencing a boom in investment. And, for good reason. These types of platforms allow for the best of both world – cloud resource consumption alongside colocation and data center control. Consider this, IDC points out that overall spending on IT infrastructure for off-premises cloud environments—both public and private—rose to $28.4 billion in 2016. For the long-term forecast, IDC expects that spending on IT infrastructure for cloud environments will grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.6% to $60.8 billion in 2020, or 49.7% of the total spending on enterprise IT infrastructure.
In this whitepaper from CoreSite, we explore how the relationship between enterprises and the cloud is constantly changing. And, we learn that what does not change is the need to measure the value technology investments bring to the business. Cloud interconnect provides several advantages to connecting over the public Internet. As the paper points out, this is most easily broken down to five key indicators:
- Security
- Performance
- Reduced Costs
- Reliability
- Ease of Doing Business
Take performance, for example. In today’s industry, slow is the new down. Just because you can deliver an application or a resource doesn’t mean it’s performing well. And, if that’s the case, users won’t be productive and won’t want to use your platform. However, a good hybrid cloud strategy can absolutely help you reduce your latency. Direct connect nodes are generally placed close to the cloud regions
of premier providers. That geographic proximity results in fewer network hops, and no packet loss. Consider this, for a colocation provider that is located within a cloud provider’s regions, that can mean as fast as under 1 millisecond of latency – and throughput is guaranteed.
Looking Ahead at Your Data Center and Hybrid
It’s important to understand that working with hybrid cloud has become much easier. Good partners are ready to help you design your direct connection platforms to gain the most out of your hybrid cloud solution. Direct connection technology is emerging as an answer to hybrid IT complexity that also sets new standards for agility, performance and reliability.
Download this whitepaper today to learn how to better align your technology investments to your business strategy. Most of all, this paper will shows you how to think about how a dedicated connection between your company and your clouds and how this could help you take the next step in your digital transformation.
Data Center Frontier is edited by Rich Miller, the data center industry’s most experienced journalist. For more than 20 years, Rich has profiled the key role played by data centers in the Internet revolution.