Emerging Hybrid Cloud Environment

How the New Normal of Hybrid Cloud is Driving Cutting-Edge

Service Provider Models

Emerging Hybrid Cloud EnvironmentHow the New Normal of Hybrid Cloud is Driving Cutting-Edge Service Provider ModelsAs cloud technology and its users’ needs continue to evolve, hybrid cloud environments have become increasingly top of mind and important as enterprises look for the most efficient ways to leverage cloud technology. And while no two definitions of hybrid cloud are alike, one thing is certain; the move to off-premises IT environments for businesses isn’t a matter of if, but when. The advantages of this type of environment are too great to ignore as the pace of technology accelerates and workloads become more complex. The “when” in this scenario is largely dependent on businesses not only understanding the hybrid cloud advantage and what hybrid cloud is—but also understanding what public cloud is not. Let’s explore both concepts.

Executives and senior IT managers have been lured to the public cloud. It’s easy to see the appeal: it is simple to implement, many large enterprises like Apple, Dropbox, and Netflix are celebrated public cloud users, and it has the reputation—earned or not—of being the cost-effective option. The public cloud contains rapid application development tools, computing scale for transient and unpredictable workloads, and large data- archival capabilities. Despite all of these positives, early users of the public cloud are now encountering significant unforeseen trade-offs and hidden financial and operational expenses. While companies can spin up an application in hours, the hidden costs of bandwidth, data storage, and compute resources required to support production-scale applications makes public cloud economically unfeasible for some uses. Once a business determines public cloud use isn’t as cost effective as advertised, they’re often shocked to learn there are significant fees associated with moving data back out of it. Users are also finding inadequacies with security, flexibility, performance, and risk of single vendor lock-in. It’s not exactly the turnkey solution that many had counted on.

The definition of hybrid cloud means different things to different people. It can describe many deployment scenarios: an on-premises environment with connections to public cloud; migration and replication of data and virtual machines back and forth between environments; and many other emerging variations. Despite its murky definition, the hybrid cloud is growing in popularity. In fact, Gartner Group recently reported that 90 percent of enterprises will operate some form of hybrid cloud by 2020.

Melanie Posey, research vice president for 451 Research defines the new normal hybrid cloud as “a delivery model that consists of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures that remain unique entities, all coordinated by standardized technology and integrated for seamless business delivery. Hybrid cloud is evolving to be an IT design architecture, not just a workload-specific solution.”

A hybrid solution allows an enterprise to leverage the advantages of public cloud for things like application development, but keep other types of data in private clouds for security and performance purposes. And yet, challenges still exist, because nothing good comes easy. As enterprises explore hybrid clouds more, they’re learning that implementation of a hybrid cloud solution can be difficult on their own. That’s why 60 percent of recent IDG survey respondents say defining a data center platform strategy is one of their most challenging issues. Effectively inventorying existing applications and their specific performance, security, compliance, storage, latency, and compute requirements is a significant and unchartered effort. Compound that with the varying types of cloud providers—Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Disaster Recovery as a Service, Software as a Service—and the hybrid cloud implementation challenge only steepens. So now the question is, how do enterprises turn these challenges into opportunities? The simple answer to this complex question is Edge colocation and cloud providers.

Edge Colocation/Cloud Providers are Critical in the Emerging Hybrid Cloud Environment While much of the easy part of cloud migration (e.g. development environments) is complete with companies leveraging the best aspects of public cloud services, several major cloud migration challenges still exist for mission-critical workloads. In fact, 451 Research reports that approximately 55 percent of mission-critical legacy applications have not moved to the cloud.

As businesses look to the cloud for faster, more flexible growth, they are challenged with the specific performance requirements of legacy applications and problems with latency. They also encounter challenges with security, compliance, local access, data movement requiring high bandwidth, and lack of local support. These sorts of challenges often handcuff organizations and lead to settling for the status quo. Enter Edge cloud providers.

Edge cloud computing, for the uninitiated, refers to distributed IT architecture in which customer data is processed at the edge of the network—as close to the origination source as possible—instead of holding all of that power in a cloud or central data warehouse. It is not meant to replace either of these things, but rather complement them and help to provide redundancy and consistent bandwidth while reducing latency, network congestion, and packet loss. With the sheer volume of workloads that businesses deal with, and the need for interconnectivity, a matter of milliseconds is critical for business application performance.

It is critical for businesses to audit their on-premises environments and assess the network and performance requirements of their applications. Only then will they be armed with the ability to select an Edge provider who not only has the physical infrastructure to support the efforts, but the intellectual capital to make everything work together in harmony. Let’s take a closer look at how and why hybrid cloud solutions are becoming the new norm, and why an Edge provider is perfectly positioned, quite literally, as the key orchestration point.

A combination of learnings from early adopters of public cloud to the enormous demands of enterprise digital transformation are causing a complete re-evaluation of hybrid cloud requirements.

Industry research firms like 451 Research and IDG report that 30–40 percent of enterprises with public cloud experience have pulled workloads back to a private cloud environment due to issues with security, cost,

manageability, performance, and poor support. This is referred to as “public cloud repatriation.” As this repatriationof applications and data takes place, enterprises begin to realize the limitations of their on-premises environments: data security, changing compliance requirements, consumption of valuable IT personal resourcesto manage and maintain systems, and the perpetual challenge of accurately sizing and purchasing hardware.While giant enterprises like Dropbox can afford their own purpose-built data centers and proprietary hardwareand operating systems, most enterprises don’t have that luxury.

An Edge provider can be an excellent landing place for repatriated services, especially if it offers:

• Modern, secure infrastructure, compute, and storage.

• A full suite of colocation and cloud solutions.

• IT consulting that can serve as an extension of your IT department to guide your hybrid cloud roadmap.

• Networking options from on-ramps through public cloud access ports.

• Industry-specific and IT-process-audited compliance.

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Public cloud users are finding it difficult to extend established business and IT controls. Enterprises have developed and relied on security and network controls for years. It’s difficult to insert these into the public

cloud. Once a business puts their applications in public cloud, they lose a certain amount of control and need to be ok with it, however reluctantly. Tools for deep visibility into application and network layers across cloud environments do not exist. More and more customers—particularly those in compliance-driven industries—are shifting toward advanced, network-level technologies that inspect every packet traversing cloud environments. This level of access isn’t currently available in the public-cloud arena. In fact, once packets enter the public cloud, there is no latency control or ability to inspect these packets that may contain proprietary and time- sensitive information. The absence of these tools in the public cloud is often the reason most mission-critical legacy applications have not yet migrated to the cloud. Applications and data of the future, their transport, and the security of business will be dependent on more in-depth levels of visibility and control throughout the hybrid cloud environment, which Edge providers offer. As a local extension of their customers’ processing environments, a good Edge provider enables the extension of security, latency, and network controls so enterprises don’t have to construct these themselves.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time data analytics has created the need for not only added bandwidth, but the speed to keep everything interconnected. Low-cost computing and the shift to

mobile means everything is becoming connected and generating data that needs to be collected, stored, and analyzed. Gartner Group projects that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet, generating approximately 40 zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes). Edge-of-network storage for these massive data stores and associated applications is ideal because of their extremely high access and processing requirements. Again, a good Edge provider will be perfectly positioned to serve as an extension of a company’s IT environment, with exceptionally scalable cloud solutions. With that peace of mind, organizations can focus on their business growth and customer needs rather than forecasting storage requirements for multiyear periods.

Networking is Everything in Hybrid Cloud Deployment Network latency, redundancy, and bandwidth are key for any application. The networks that an application uses impact its performance tremendously, especially for mobile- and cloud-based services. Inconsistent bandwidth, high jitter, and packet loss all degrade application performance. Since application performance drives user experience, network performance is overwhelmingly the most important factor impacting user experience. One of the original fears of public cloud was the potential degradation of the user experience due to network latency.

Hybrid cloud deployment strategies must weigh underlying network speed and performance. The variation of application performance and user experience between 1 millisecond (ms) response in an Edge provider’s intra-cloud environment or 5 ms inter-cloud across connected data centers, versus 100 ms response times from public clouds is extremely significant. With telecom costs for even 1-GB circuits from in-metro carriers dropping dramatically, high-speed connectivity from on-premises platforms to Edge cloud services is now a financial reality for most enterprises. Network speed is the critical factor in application performance, and application performance is the most critical factor in user experience. Network speed equals happy users.

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Introducing the LightEdge Hybrid Cloud Solution Center 451 Research’s enterprise survey data tells us that 50 percent of organizations want a single-provider-managed, multisourced hybrid cloud solutions.While the selection of an Edge partner is critical, the emergence of complex hybrid cloud deployments requires a different type of partner—a partner that truly offers turnkey options for on-premises, colocation, and hybrid cloud planning, implementation, management, and leverage. This partner should become an extension of your IT organization, and a trusted advisor for your requirements both today and in the future. At LightEdge, what separates us from other Edge providers is our ability to architect, orchestrate, and manage your hybrid cloud deployment.

Think of it like a technology ecosystem where the Edge meets the backbone, public clouds meets private, security and compliance are visibly tangible, and LightEdge professionals can help you architect and integrate all components to meet your specific requirements.

LightEdge provides an easy path for you to consume public cloud features, while keeping your more sensitive data safe in a private cloud. You can keep each type of data and application in the perfect place and we’ll manage it for you. As your single point of contact, we ensure everything is operating as it should: safely and quickly, and at the edge the network.

The LightEdge Hybrid Cloud Solution Center offers you a custom solution for your business needs, no matter which type of hybrid cloud deployment works best for you. Hardened and secure colocation solutions are our first step to ensuring security and compliance. Then we tap into a complete portfolio of high-speed, secure, and redundant local cloud services and managed gateways to public clouds. LightEdge is a hybrid cloud solution provider that enables extremely high synchronicity, redundancy, and consistent bandwidth, while greatly reducing latency, network congestion, and packet loss. Everything we do enables a successful hybrid cloud solution.

LightEdge colocation and cloud solutions have all been architected with the primary design tenants of performance, security, compliance, and control. But these attributes are becoming table stakes. Our Hybrid Cloud Solution Center capabilities span many dimensions, which we believe are non-negotiable for a hybrid provider and make LightEdge unique:

Facilities and Infrastructure• Hardened data centers that provide physical security, natural disaster protection, and state-of-the-art

power, cooling, and management systems.

• Geo-diverse, Tier III complaint data centers that offer intra- and inter-data center redundancy with world-class security.

• A broad range of cloud solutions that can be deployed in multi-tenant or private configurations.

• Very high-speed connectivity between LightEdge data centers that naturally enable peak application performance, low latency, redundancy, and customer specific disaster recovery options.

• Turnkey hybrid cloud management from a single provider that manages all aspects of hybrid cloud deployments, including 24/7/365 single contact points for hybrid cloud support, troubleshooting, and problem resolution.

Platform• Colocation options that range from racks to cages to private suites that offer options

to easily access and consume LightEdge cloud solutions and/or public cloud resources, if and when, desired.

• Secure, scalable mobile computing solutions that enable your workforce without compromising proprietary and protected data.

Process• Audited compliance to major industry standards to the level that compliance risk assumption can be

assumed by LightEdge on behalf of customers.

• Audited and controlled processes that ensure every operational action is documented and adhered to, thereby greatly minimizing the potential for human error.

• Hardware and software resale, along with cloud software license compliance services.

• Partnerships with national and global companies with expertise in applications, data, compute, security, and network products.

People • A world-class consulting organization with the breadth of skills to perform workload profiling, create

hybrid cloud roadmaps, and optimize network setups to achieve the highest possible application performance, and the know-how to help customers configure and implement custom hybrid cloud deployments.

• The technical DNA to stay a step ahead of new technology on behalf of its customers.

Summary Careful planning of the network and proper workload placement is essential to meeting the needs of mission-critical applications. The LightEdge Hybrid Solution Center leverages many different layers of interconnectivity from on-premises to Edge, Edge to public cloud, and intra- and inter-data center connections—all with management and QoS visibility throughout. LightEdge’s ability to architect the right hybrid cloud network to meet customer’s individual business requirements is key to enabling the true digitization of your business.

Complementing our ability to meet all the most-demanding requirements expected of cloud providers is the fact that LightEdge has networking in its DNA. For more than 20 years, we have been architecting, implementing, managing, and optimizing networks for our customers. And the most fundamental requirement for implementing and managing a hybrid cloud environment is the network.

Having an Edge Cloud Service provider help your business with everything from basic colocation to complex cloud migration is quickly becoming a necessity rather than a luxury. These are big undertakings, filled with many uncertainties, but the LightEdge Hybrid Cloud Solution Center takes the guesswork out of the equation and substitutes that uncertainty with peace of mind and performance.