Cloud Hosting

The data center will help unlock the most effective utilization of the cloud by providing a complete IT infrastructure ecosystem that can mix and match each workload with the infrastructure that best supports it. (Photo: Rich Miller)

JP Laqueur, Senior Vice Presidentof Marketing atDataBank, explores the close ties between cloud strategyand success anddata center strategy and approaches.

JP Laqueur, SVP of Marketing, DataBank

Cloud technologies have enabled enterprises to lower operational and capital expenditures, accelerate the development and release of new products and services, and dynamically adjust their IT infrastructure to meet changing market demand. As a result, cloud technologies continue to gain traction and according to IDC, by the end of 2020, 67% of enterprise infrastructure will be based in the cloud.

But not all cloud service providers or platforms are created equally, nor are they always appropriate for certain business sectors or strategic objectives. Some organizations, especially those with strict performance or complex compliance requirements, have re-patriated applications back to premise-based infrastructures after finding cloud platforms were more expensive to operate, or presented additional management and security challenges. In fact, according to IDC in its Q119 CloudPulse report, as many as 85% of customers had initiated some kind of cloud repatriation effort.

And while some clouds have remained general purpose, newer enterprise clouds have emerged to address the needs of organizations that have greater fault tolerance, security, and compliance requirements.

But the evaluation of which infrastructure is best for an application can no longer simply be a debate about cloud vs. on-premises, or about which type of cloud. It needs to include the consideration of a modern, data center operator. In fact, we believe a thirdparty data center should be at the heart of every cloud or hybrid infrastructure decision and its the topic of our latest White Paper: A Better Way To Cloud.

Why? The modern data center with its ability to aggregate colocation, cloud and managed services is rapidly becoming the core of a hybrid strategy, providing a critical thirdleg in the infrastructure stool, providing greater security and data privacy than many clouds, and hands on management and compliance expertise beyond the reach of an in-house team.

The data center will help unlock the most effective utilization of the cloud by providing a complete IT infrastructure ecosystem that can mix and match each workload with the infrastructure that best supports it.

Here is a closer look at the reasons establishing the right data center foundation can help enable the right cloud strategy:

Leveraging these capabilities in todays data center helps maximize the effectiveness of any cloud strategy.

(Photo: Courtesy of Databank)

In addition, the data center will help unlock the most effective utilization of the cloud by providing a complete IT infrastructure ecosystem that can mix and match each workload with the infrastructure that best supports it. And properly constructed, that ecosystem can provide a secure filter through which users access applications whether they are collocated in a data center, on a private cloud platform or in the public cloud.

For instance, a security- and latency-sensitive application can be collocated on company-owned equipment in the data center but protected by the data centers DDoS, IDS/IPS and web application firewalls. Meanwhile, a different application might be hosted on the data centers private cloud platform, protected by additional managed security services such as file integrity monitoring and configuration scanning. And if needed, that application could access public cloud platforms via data center-provided on-ramps for additional scaling. In each case, the data center is at the core of the infrastructure protecting data and users as they access applications on any of the infrastructure platforms.

The best data center in 2020 provides the most effective strategy for embracing the cloud while providing the flexibility to adapt as conditions and technology changes. And thats why the right cloud strategy starts with the right data center strategy.

JP Laqueur is the Senior Vice Presidentof Marketing atDataBank.

For more information on how DataBanks Data Center Evolved Ecosystem enables this kind of hybrid approach, check out our latest white paper: A Better Way To Cloud.

Read the original:
The Right Cloud Strategy Starts with the Right Data Center Strategy - Data Center Frontier