Hybrid cloud offers a number of benefits to your business. Chief among them, agility and the ability to take control of corporate IT assets in the service of business objectives, such as growing into a new market or improving service to existing customers.
Importantly, hybrid cloud helps you better address one core IT consideration that has direct relevance to the customer experience and service delivery: connectivity.
For those still not sold on the idea, here’s a quick primer on hybrid cloud and its impact on connectivity.
What is Hybrid Cloud?
Hybrid cloud refers to an IT deployment model that combines a data centre or private cloud with public cloud from a commercial provider such as Amazon, Microsoft or Google. When private and public clouds are used together, this refers to a hybrid cloud. The former is private cloud infrastructure used by a single organisation behind a firewall. The latter is public cloud infrastructure. Workloads move between these private and public clouds as required over an encrypted connection. This means hybrid clouds are responsible for facilitating the exchange of computing services such as data storage, software applications, analytics, and intelligence tools.
Benefits of Hybrid Cloud
There are lots of benefits in your business exploring hybrid cloud.
To start off the hybrid cloud benefits, there’s the “best of both worlds” argument. It’s the idea that hybrid cloud gives you the security and control of private IT combined with the agility and flexibility of the public cloud. You can quickly launch new apps and services from the public cloud, without having to invest in the hardware or infrastructure to build or acquire your own private facility.
Secondly, hybrid cloud benefits your business as it allows you to plan your IT architecture strategically. You could choose to deploy some applications within a data centre shared by peer businesses you want to work with. For example, if you’re in financial services, a London-based data centre would put you near relevant businesses in one of the world’s top financial markets.
How Does Hybrid Cloud Improve Connectivity?
Hybrid cloud connectivity goes back to the concept of control. By deploying from the hybrid cloud, you can control your IT in a way that improves the latency and reliability of your services. To achieve that control, you need the right hybrid cloud environment.
Colocation Enables Connectivity
Hybrid Colocation is an important part of the hybrid cloud story, because it’s the best environment to ensure high-quality hybrid cloud connectivity between private and public clouds.
What is colocation in a data centre? Colocation involves leasing space in a facility from a third-party data centre provider. These providers offer fast, secure interconnections to the top public cloud services, which effectively gives you a fast lane to exchange information between your private and public IT. It’s better than using the public internet, where connections between public and private clouds can suffer from high latency, inconsistent throughout and poor security.
It’s also better than extending your corporate wide area network, which has both scalability and cost issues – especially when you are running high volume workloads and need to connect to multiple clouds.
That’s how colocation helps hybrid cloud deliver on the promise of high-quality connectivity.
At our data centres, we have the highest density of connectivity providers of any European data centre operator, giving our customers unrivalled access to a range of partners across all of our data centre locations. The majority of network carriers are present in at least one of our data centres – if you’d like to find out more about specific carriers, you can request a connectivity list from us.
With more than 700 network carriers to choose from, you have the freedom to pick a supplier based on cost, reliability and reputation. We’ll even help you make your decision. You can find all our colocation data centre specifications in our handy factsheets. Simply head over to our resource library, where you’ll also find information on sustainability, cloud migration and much more.
Learn more about Interxion on our website, or contact us today for more details.
