“The mix is getting mixier,” said IDG Analyst John Gallant about five minutes into a webinar on hybrid IT trends identified in the 2021 State of the Data Center Report. That caught my attention because I think it’s a clever remark, and because it succinctly characterizes the increasing diversity seen in modern infrastructure.
Our customers tell us that the greatest challenge that comes with “mixier-ness” is determining where to deploy workloads. Furthermore, it’s anything but one-and-done. As business objectives change, processes morph and the “next normal” (for example hybrid work) arrives, each enterprise needs to be able to move/add/turn on and off applications in response. That optionality, agility and control are critical to a “future-proof” infrastructure.
I discuss how colocation and multi-cloud strategies can enable meeting these objectives in our latest white paper, “Solving IT Modernization Challenges with Hybrid IT.” As one key message in the paper, workload repatriation has become a hot topic in response to increasing cloud costs. The primary goals are to reduce total cost of operations, set predictable operational costs, achieve higher levels of security and enhance the customer experience. That’s not to say public cloud adoption is declining. As noted in How Enterprises Solve Wicked IT Problems, “19 percent of enterprises have accelerated public cloud migration, while just two percent moved away from public clouds” in the past two years.¹
So, where do you start optimizing workload deployment? Here are three areas of evaluation and recommendations to consider. Obviously, there are many more factors to weigh when making what are truly critical decisions, and we would welcome the opportunity to discuss them in the context of colocation and the expertise our ecosystem of hybrid IT partners provide.
How do you build a future-proof infrastructure, one that meets your business objectives today and enables you to take advantage of containerized development to relatively easily lift and redeploy workloads? Colocation can be the foundation for a hybrid IT strategy taking you into the future, enabling workload management at the intersection of the dynamic, interconnecting elements forming your infrastructure – including public and private clouds, hardware and networks.
CoreSite, along with our ecosystem of customers, service providers and partners, can help you develop a custom solution that optimizes your application mix today, with an eye to the future. Because, as we all know, the mix today will probably need to be “mixier” in the near future.
Please download and read Solving IT Modernization Challenges with Hybrid IT, and get it touch with us to discuss your challenges and how we can help.
¹.Can private clouds ever really compete with the public cloud?, 451 Research®
Aleks Krusko
Senior Vice President of Information Technology and Digitization
Aleks Krusko is responsible for the execution of CoreSite’s digital strategies through technology, automation and business transformation. She leads the IT Solutions Delivery and IT Operations teams, including software development, system support, information security and business intelligence. Aleks joined CoreSite in 2008.
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