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Direct Connect: The Key to Building Your Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
More and more enterprises are migrating critical applications to distributed architectures. In fact, by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure services. If you want to take advantage of flexible infrastructures and application services, you need consistent, predictable, secure and always available network connectivity between these services.
Last week, we discussed the value of moving some applications to the cloud (speed, agility, reliability and more) and options to begin the process. In a widely-distributed architecture, your organization will likely need to rely on more than one Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to support data, applications, and geographic needs. On average, companies use more than four public and private clouds to support their business requirements.
Why will my organization need access to multiple clouds?
Each company’s hybrid cloud strategy is different based on enterprise needs. Some things to consider for your strategy include:
- Regional needs and available CSPs in these markets (closer to the edge)
- Regulatory requirements related to your data and applications
- How cloud environments may need to be accessed or integrated across markets or applications
How do organizations connect to the cloud with a hybrid cloud model?
For applications in the cloud, you’ll want direct cloud connects to CSPs like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and IBM. To connect with partners and providers privately and securely, companies can make dedicated connections within the same location rather than using the public internet to connect to Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), improving performance, speed and reducing latency.
What are the benefits for direct connections to providers?
Private, secure direct interconnections enable:
- On-demand access to CSPs and rich ecosystem of network and service providers
- Lower latency
- Speed/bandwidth options
- Improved stability and security
- Zero-touch provisioning to scale up and down in minutes rather than days or weeks
- Remote interconnection to clouds outside of metro markets
- Great redundancy
My IT team fears a hybrid cloud strategy may reduce reaction times and lack the necessary control over applications. How can I make them feel better about moving to the cloud?
Automation. With an easy-to-use, software defined interconnection, businesses can access CSPs directly via multiple virtual connections through a single physical port. This type of automated connection model not only provides speed of delivery, but it can also reduce the effort your team needs to invest to deploy, manage, or decommission those circuits, freeing them up to focus on other projects.
Cloud migrations can be highly impactful to legacy application architectures, and sometimes require a complete application redesign. It’s important to create architectures that allow your organization to take advantage of cloud platforms where it makes sense in your business, and still tightly integrate those applications and services with other legacy applications, data stores, and or unique business applications.
Do you need help in getting started on a cloud strategy for your business? We can help you understand your options to leverage the cloud.
Want to learn more about hybrid cloud? Download our white paper about managing your digital transformation.
Or, catch up with last week’s post where we discussed the initial considerations when planning your cloud strategy.
For more information on moving to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, visit cologix.com or reach out to one of our solution experts at sales@cologix.com.
