As digital disruption transforms one industry after another, all organisations face the need for fundamental change. IT no longer just supports day-to-day operations - it’s now a primary driver of innovation, growth and competitiveness. The right technology choices are crucial to business survival.
Cloud adoption is one such strategic choice that’s now central to business success. Unlike traditional IT infrastructure, the cloud lets organisations adopt the resources they need on-demand, minimising overheads and maximising agility. As a result, businesses can experiment, innovate and flex with change much more easily, ensuring their competitive edge stays sharp.
Hybrid traits
Of course, ‘the cloud’ isn’t homogenous – a vast range of platforms and options are available. The best choice for most businesses is a hybrid approach that combines the security and performance of on-premise infrastructure with the public cloud’s agility, cost-savings and economies of scale.
Hybrid cloud’s uptake tripled in 2016, with almost two-thirds (57%) of organisations adopting it. Hybrid strategies are also increasingly popular amongst ‘digital leaders’ (those companies moving the fastest toward digital transformation) with a third (28%) already using it and almost half (44%) planning to adopt it soon.
Balancing agility and control, hybrid cloud provides an ideal platform for business innovation. With nine-in-ten business leaders agreeing a hybrid strategy is crucial to their organisation’s success, those resisting cloud transformation due to fears over security, skills or costs need to think again.
As 75.4 billion connected things loom on the horizon, organisations need to capitalise on the business potential of skyrocketing data and connectivity. At the same time, it’s essential to face up to tough new data protection laws, ensure security, control spending and meet the increasingly demanding expectations of employees, customers and partners.
Hybrid cloud creates the right IT environment to meet these challenges; it frees organisations to choose the best platforms for their data and balance the demands of innovation, agility, security and risk. Here are just some examples:
- Security and performance: Sensitive data can stay on-premise or in the private cloud, but organisations also remain free to tap into the public cloud’s elastic IT resources.
- Agility: Optimise workloads on the right platform; for instance, deploying customer-facing applications from the public cloud, while hosting employee applications on-premise.
- Cost-effectiveness: Hybrid cloud enables organisations to store different types of data on whichever platforms make the best financial sense – orchestrating space, equipment, staff and infrastructure more effectively.
Start your journey
Hybrid cloud may be the right destination for your business, but to make the strategy a success, the right starting point is just as crucial.
90% of European companies currently cite the links between on-premise and cloud-based workloads as the biggest barrier to hybrid cloud adoption. As a result, organisations need to take their on-premise infrastructure to where the cloud lives.
Colocation is an attractive solution. Organisations can place their private IT infrastructure right on the cloud’s doorstep, connecting to the most popular hyperscale cloud platforms through private access points. This helps in achieving a cost-effective route to superior hybrid cloud performance, whilst maintaining security and agility.
By colocating at a facility that brings instant access to a multi-cloud environment, organisations can reduce infrastructure costs, nimbly select the right cloud for the right workload, increase availability and reduce latency. Colocated hybrid cloud also leaves organisations well-placed to embrace a fully-optimised, mixed IT setup, that combines on-premise, colocated, and cloud-based resources.
Interxion is already seeing increasing uptake of its Cloud Connect service at our London data centre campus. Our facility houses private access points to the most popular cloud platforms, including AWS and Azure. Customers can build and manage private VLAN links to multiple clouds through a single, secure connection – all with rapid provisioning, no duplicate charges on data and unbeatable SLAs guaranteeing 99.999% availability. A £30 million expansion is also underway that will add 1,800m2 of data centre space to our London campus – enabling even more businesses to start their journey to the cloud.
If your business isn’t planning for cloud transformation, it risks being left behind. Find out how Interxion’s expanding London Data Centre Campus can help accelerate your journey to the cloud.
