According to The Cloud Industry Forum, nearly three-quarters (78%) of UK firms are now embracing the cloud, citing flexibility (77%), scalability (76%) and reliability (74%) as the leading drivers. By 2018, some two-thirds (60%) of all workloads will be running on cloud platforms.
Hybrid hope
The cloud enables organisations to access resources on-demand, minimising expenditure and maximising flexibility. By creating economies of scale spanning millions of business customers, hyperscale cloud has commoditised IT resources - dramatically lowering both the cost of innovation and the price of failure when experimentation fails.
However, the cloud is not a monolithic solution: organisations must choose between public, private or hybrid environments based on their specific needs and ultimate goals. Today, most organisations (67%) are migrating to hybrid strategies that combine the security and performance of private infrastructure with the public cloud’s agility, cost-savings and economies of scale.
While hybrid cloud means organisations can benefit from a blend of services, delivery and deployment options better tailored to their needs, it’s also the most complex solution to orchestrate. Information must move seamlessly and securely between multiple clouds and on-premise systems to support organisations effectively.
Data centre dynamics
As the nexus for connectivity, processing and storage in the digital age, data centres are central to delivering the performance, security and resilience hybrid and multi-cloud strategies demand. However, 90% of European companies currently cite the links between on-premise and cloud-based workloads as the biggest barrier to hybrid cloud adoption.
Colocation offers the ideal solution – enabling organisations to place their IT infrastructure in the same facility as private connection points to hyperscale cloud platforms. This enables vastly superior performance for cloud-based applications and services compared to connecting via the public internet, while also ensuring top-notch security and resilience. By enabling organisations to bypass the internet entirely, risks such as DDoS attacks, phishing and malware inflection can be eliminated.
Look to London
As a global hub for telecoms companies, cloud providers and international fibre optic links, central London is the ideal data centre location for those seeking to capitalise on the cloud.
At Interxion’s London data centre campus, we’re seeing growing uptake of our Cloud Connect service. Housing private access points to the most popular cloud platforms, including AWS and Azure, our facility allows customers to build and manage links to multiple clouds through a single, secure connection.
With unrivalled cloud connectivity and colocated infrastructure just a stone’s throw from London’s critical mass of consumers and corporations, organisations can build high-performance hybrid IT capabilities that satisfy even the most demanding customers.
Our campus also ensures unmatched resilience for business-critical cloud capabilities - with fully-redundant connectivity, power and cooling backed up by 99.999% SLAs, proven compliance with industry standards and state-of-the-art systems to monitor and manage operations 24x7.
To keep pace with customer demand, a £30 million expansion is now underway at our London data centre campus. LON3 will add 1,800m2 more space – enabling even more businesses to capitalise on the full potential of a cloud-first future.
Find out how Interxion’s expanding London data centre campus can help your business harness the power of the cloud to connect, exchange and transform.
