Enterprise needs drive IT change
Businesses need to move fast to react to changing environments and maintain their competitive edge.
Increasingly, IT is being asked to become more agile, while at the same time being pressured by the CFO to reduce capital expenditures. How can organisations do both? Developing a hybrid cloud strategy can go a long way towards meeting those goals, but there are barriers to hybrid architecture to overcome.
As enterprises become more reliant on data-driven decision-making, the number of applications and the amount of data an organisation consumes continue to spiral upward. As IT focuses on meeting demands from business units, management is also looking at ways to increase efficiency and reduce expenditures.
Legacy IT has left enterprises with multiple data centres, often requiring redundant staffing and expenditures just to keep the lights on compared to a single, consolidated data centre.
Business executives look at the growth of everything-as-a-service and challenge their IT teams to find ways of moving from a Capex to an Opex model to better predict IT expenditures and preserve capital.
At the same time, the increasing mobility of end users located in dispersed branch offices puts pressure on IT performance. If data centres are consolidated, what will be the latency impact for users scattered around the globe, and what kind of performance can employees, customers and partners expect when connectivity can’t be controlled?
As IT seeks to meet these demands, every decision it makes on new technologies and approaches must also be made with security and privacy considerations, ensuring that governance and regulatory challenges are met; that data and users are protected and that the business is protected from phishing and ransomware-attacks that can impact the bottom line as well as goodwill.
One approach to solve all these problems is to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy that embraces both private, on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.
Hybrid and Multi cloud is no longer a matter of ‘if’ – it’s a matter of ‘when’. It lowers the risk of cloud provider lock-in, and can provide service resiliency and migration opportunities, in addition to the core cloud benefits of agility, scalability and elasticity.
Challenges for Hybrid Deployment
The hybrid cloud market is set to explode, with some analysts projecting growth from $44B in 2018 to nearly $100B in 2023.
The potential benefits are a myriad – seamlessly move workloads between on-premises infrastructure and one or more cloud providers; choose different public cloud providers for different workloads based on how well their attributes match those of the application and to avoid vendor lock-in; and integrate a broad range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers into a fabric that simplifies access for every application (SaaS, hosted or on-premises) for every user worldwide.
Unfortunately, this ideal hybrid cloud environment can be difficult to achieve. Legacy applications may not be cloud ready, regulatory and governance issues can dictate where data resides, WAN latency can lead to inconsistent performance, and businesses fear cloud vendor lock-in.
Until now, there hasn’t been a single platform that could easily consolidate data centres to support cloud-adjacent workloads. These workloads are enabled with high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity to one or more cloud providers to facilitate rapid and painless migration to cloud, or to clouds and back, if more capacity is needed or business demands change.
There has not been a single platform that offered the type of interconnections between multiple cloud providers that would enable across the board code modernisation that will foster a new generation of cloud-native applications in a multicloud environment. Nor has one platform offered the ability to connect multiple clouds and on-premises infrastructure to services like Salesforce and Office 365 and the increasing numbers of new SaaS offerings that have become deeply integrated into enterprise IT.
In short, there has been no “easy button” to deploy hybrid solutions.
A new approach to Hybrid Cloud
Now, enterprises of all sizes can find a smoother path to the cloud, thanks to Assembly, a global leader in interconnection. With a built-for-scale platform that solves these challenges by providing an ecosystem with high-speed, low-latency connections to major cloud providers that helps businesses achieve many of their strategic technology goals.
Assembly directly, securely and dynamically connects distributed infrastructure and digital ecosystems globally via software-defined interconnection. It simply speeds hybrid cloud for every user.
Our flexible, on-demand global interconnection solution lets an organisation move everything from development to tier one workloads, and from Capex to Opex, enabling pay-as-you-use access to optimised workloads that cost-effectively align business and technology needs.
Benefits include:
• Increased agility to deploy, connect and scale resources to either cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
• Enhanced security enabled by privately connecting to your hybrid environment, bypassing the public internet entirely.
• Deep global integration with AWS, VMware and Microsoft offering sub-millisecond round-trip latency for enhanced performance.
• Connectivity to all clouds and SaaS to enhance multicloud performance.
Enterprises can choose clouds in their needed geography without worrying about performance impacts.
The bottom-line benefits of using an optimised hybrid cloud deployment are clear – achieve enterprise IT cost reduction goals, accelerate Capex to Opex conversion, leverage the cloud without required legacy infrastructure upgrades – all while enabling modernisation that supports a new hybrid environment to meet changing business demands with ease.
Assembly provides a rich platform and industry-leading solutions for every enterprise, no matter where it is on its cloud journey. Whether your business wants to become multicloud-enabled, or just wants the best possible performance from any cloud service, it’s all here for you.
There’s a realisation that digital transformation is becoming ever more important. Assembly is well positioned to help your enterprise drive down total cost of ownership while enhancing performance, security and user experience, and eliminating vendor lock-in.
Assembly can help companies maximise user experience and application performance, solve various problems encountered in multi-cloud, and respond quickly, cheaply and securely to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery.
Talk to one of our team today to learn more about our cloud capabilities; how we’re bringing people, business and technology together; and what this means for you.
