The world of business connectivity is changing
Cloud has been a major force in enterprise IT for several years now – and it’s domination seems all but complete. By the end of the year, it’s estimated that 83% of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud.
The number of businesses holding onto on-premises systems is shrinking, as cloud tech gets smarter and the offerings from cloud service providers (CSPs) become more compelling. This will make it easier for IT leaders to make the decision to complete the cloud migration of workloads that have previously been confined to aging legacy infrastructure.
However, 2019 wasn’t just a year of expansion and consolidation, but change and adaptation as well. Migrating to the cloud isn’t the end of the story; it’s the beginning of a new one. As organisations seek the best deployment model for their needs and customer demands in the years ahead, they should also invest in the level of interconnectivity needed to support their cloud ambitions.
The evolution of the cloud
As the leading cloud adopters look for ways to improve operations and get more from their technology, we’re seeing a significant increase in the number of companies exploring the hybrid cloud model. At the same time, we’re witnessing a major uptick in multicloud usage as the industry grows and diversifies.
By building their own hybrid cloud environments, companies can create an infrastructure that fits their exact specifications, rather than opting for a solution that might not meet their needs. This is why it is becoming the default option for many new cloud adopters.
Conversely, with so many powerful applications available in the cloud today, many businesses are waking up to the fact that they can’t get the best spread from a single provider and are, therefore, going multicloud. Businesses are experiencing real challenges in connecting together the various public clouds that comprise their multicloud architectures. Connectivity between the public clouds is a key aspect of interoperation and multicloud success.
Further complicating matters is the rise of edge computing. The initial rollout of 5G networks in the UK means the cloud is getting closer to consumer and professional devices as well as data sources. With lower latency, smarter bandwidth utilisation, and more control over where data’s going and what it’s doing, organisations are able to run analytics and other programs faster than ever.
However, with so much more processing, storage, and analysis being completed at the edge of the network – rather than at centralised data centres – businesses will be looking for solutions that deliver strong, reliable, and high-capacity connectivity.
Indeed, regardless of what new forms the cloud is taking, the direction of travel is clear: all models need consistent and flexible connectivity. Hybrid and multicloud connectivity requires a private, direct, and dedicated solution – one that’s fast, reliable, scalable, and secure enough to support operations across multiple cloud environments, or cloud and on-premises systems.
Hyperconvergence and connectivity in the cloud
The rise of both hybrid and multicloud approaches in 2019 has triggered a major shift in how IT and network teams operate today. The core of their roles has transformed – they’re now much more comfortable managing applications and services than they are managing infrastructure.
In the year to come, we can expect this shift to help push hyperconverged infrastructure further into the mainstream. Hyperconvergence describes an IT framework that connects storage, computing and networking together in a single system to reduce complexity and increase system stability.
This organises all of your connections from one place and brings the network together into a single platform. The rationale is to reduce complexity and improve responsiveness by bringing everything together into a seamless process, rather than managing each resource separately.
As more and more businesses realise that they’re spending too many resources ‘keeping the lights on’, many will seek out new ways of accessing, assembling, and paying for their on-premises infrastructure. This will naturally lead them to modern, hyperconverged options.
By abstracting critical elements of their infrastructure using hyperconverged tools, businesses can spend less time worrying about keeping legacy hardware running, and more time focusing on the mission-critical applications their company and customers depend on.
With companies like Nutanix offering intuitive hyperconverged services that unify private and public environments, we should anticipate seeing many more businesses embrace hyperconverged infrastructure technology in the years ahead.
To drive their business forward, organisations must find new ways of connecting their disparate data silos to build a stable, scalable foundation for connectivity. As the cloud evolves, it also becomes more specialised and complex, so businesses need a connected system that allows both the timely analysis of data, and the reliable delivery of services to business users and consumers alike.
The trends of 2019 highlight how important it is for enterprise connectivity products and solutions to work together to make interconnection seamless, strong, and reliable. If organisations want their new – and expanding – cloud and on-premises environments to deliver value in the long term, interconnectivity needs to be top of their agenda right now.
About the Author
Eric Troyer, CMO at Megaport. Driven and experienced Internet and Telecommunications business leader with a firm understanding of market dynamics and how technology trends impact revenue opportunities. Having successfully transitioned from engineering and technical roles to product and line of business ownership, I am enabled with a view into the data services industry that is unique and insightful. My business development role in helping shape the topology of the Internet can be found here: http://andrewblum.net/#tubes-book
Featured image: ©Zhaojiankang
