According to a recent report, as of 2015, 82 percent of enterprises in the United States have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy to help streamline IT. Although hybrid cloud adoption in Europe is a bit behind, experts are anticipating that almost half of all enterprises on the continent will have embraced this model by 2017, while hybrid cloud adoption globally is poised to triple by 2018.
This global expansion shouldn’t come as a surprise given the agility that a hybrid cloud model lends to businesses and their workers. The ability for teams to collaborate over cloud also lends itself to significant OPEX savings, since an array of business-critical applications live in the cloud as opposed to on premise servers managed by in-house IT.
Despite these benefits, the slow adoption of hybrid cloud by European businesses compared to their counterparts Stateside can be largely attributed to fears regarding data protection and security. These are fair concerns, considering businesses will need to trust that their sensitive corporate data is secure when travelling from a private data store to a public cloud environment. If a company can’t ensure that the transition to hybrid cloud won’t compromise confidential information, the switch could become more costly than it’s worth once damage control has been enacted.
Many of these concerns stem from the assumption that a hybrid cloud architecture requires data to travel over the hard-to-secure public Internet. To remove the reliance on public Internet for hybrid adoption, our Cloud Connect service moves data sets over a direct connection between the cloud service and the enterprise’s PoP in a colocation data center. To expand this offering to even more customers, we’ve recently rolled it out to facilities in Stockholm, Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen.
This direct connection allows businesses to achieve higher network performance since they aren’t sharing a congested public Internet connection to the cloud, as well as offer SLAs for guaranteed availability and greater data privacy. This direct connection also gives companies complete control over the data that they are placing into a cloud environment from within their colocated private data store.
Now that this service has been extended to the primary Gateway markets in Europe, companies across the continent can reap the rewards of hybrid cloud to grow their business without having to grow their physical footprint.