Find the Right Data Center Partner to Optimize Your Hybrid Cloud

The question is no longer, “Are you considering a hybrid cloud strategy?” but rather, “Is your current hybrid cloud environment optimized?” According to a recent Rightscale report, 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. In addition, 28% of enterprises are prioritizing hybrid cloud, and 17% are prioritizing public and private cloud equally. This cloud transformation has put enormous strain on IT departments to manage costs and optimize performance, all while ensuring the data of their organizations remain secure. Or in other words – optimizing is the name of the game right now.

While every environment has its unique challenges, there are a few standard considerations for IT professionals when choosing a data center partner. But, more importantly, in our current times, the question becomes - who will enable them to optimize their current hybrid cloud environment while providing them the flexibility to adapt to the continually evolving IT environment?

With cloud users running applications in an average of 4.9 clouds, it is becoming increasingly crucial for a data center partner to provide direct connectivity to multiple clouds. Why direct connectivity? Direct connectivity is the best way to ensure secure, reliable, low latency connectivity at the lowest price.

Public Cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google, select specific markets and typically one or two providers in each market to extend their public cloud via a “node” in a data center. This node provides a direct connection for customers in that data center straight into the public cloud, often at significantly reduced (sometimes 3X each way) ingress and egress rates for sending and receiving data than customers could obtain by connecting to these public cloud providers via the internet or directly themselves.

Also, since it is a direct connection, there are no "hops" along the way, making the connection secure and one of the lowest latencies available from that market via a simple cross-connect within the data center.

Whether you are trying to connect one or multiple locations to your data center provider, it is essential to have the flexibility to choose from many different network providers. Network and communication environments are transforming nearly as rapidly as the cloud environment. This, coupled with ongoing industry consolidation and price compression, require enterprises to make complex and strategic business decisions.

Finally, it is vital to find a data center that can provide a private cloud and managed cloud solution. With over 72% of enterprises running private clouds and IT professionals continuously optimizing workloads between public and private clouds, it is important to have a provider that allows them to maximize the performance of those applications but also provide flexibility to expand.

With the launch of CoreSite's 'Solution Partner Program,' enterprise customers can now have their entire hybrid cloud environment supported within a CoreSite data center. Enterprises can:

• have world-class data center space with 100% uptime SLA
• directly connect to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM Cloud and Alibaba Cloud
• access over 450 networks, as well as hundreds of cloud and IT service providers to help map out and connect the entire solution

Together, we can build, manage and support your complete digital transformation. Contact your channel manager for more information and additional services available in your market.

This article was originally published on Oct 29th, 2018. This version has been updated for Dec 9th, 2019.

2019 cloud computing trends from the latest RightScale State of the Cloud Survey