It’s become tradition at Interxion at the end of each year to publish our predictions for the year ahead for some of the industry verticals we follow closely. Back in 2012 we made predictions for the future of the cloud, and, while it’s taking longer than we thought to materialise, most of what we predicted is shaping up to be true. One prediction that rings particularly true today was around the growing need for private connections to public clouds. That’s clouds, with an s on the end. It’s that one simple letter that really stuck with me.
As IT managers continue to seek out the cost saving, agility, and elasticity benefits of the cloud, they are also realising the need for a multicloud solution – one in which multiple Cloud Service Providers are used for different applications to optimise their IT strategies. Clouds with an s. In fact, this year Forrester published a report about how a multicloud strategy delivers value to enterprises.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Cloud use is so widespread over so many applications that it’s almost crazy to utilise a one-provider-fits-all solution. But that’s where many of us started. With one application in the cloud, with one provider. It would have been easy to continue with that same provider we started with, and if you were an early adopter there weren’t that many choices. But as more and more providers spring up with tailor made solutions, we’d be doing ourselves a disservice to pick the same provider each time, just because they were the first one we went with when we decided to begin our cloud migration. However, moving to a multicloud architecture can have its drawbacks if you’re not careful. Even if you are ready to migrate services, the time it takes to provision connections to each cloud platform can make you feel like the cloud is the opposite of agile.
Interxion’s Cloud Connect is designed for the multicloud world. With one physical connection, you can reach all your cloud providers through VLAN connections which are automatically provisioned at the time of the order. Not only does this save you time, but you don’t have the hassle of managing individual connections to all of your different cloud providers. Providers with an s. It’s the simple solution for connecting to your cloud environments and gives the added benefits of security and high availability backed by SLAs.
Thinking back to that prediction from 2012 and the extra s that has become oh so important to our IT strategies in 2016, I wonder if it was an accident or intentional, because it sure seems like we had a crystal ball into the future. As IT becomes increasingly dispersed, remember that using a multicloud strategy doesn’t have to mean an overly complicated network solution.