Public cloud. Private cloud. Hybrid cloud. As IT professionals attempt to navigate the ever-evolving world of cloud technology to find the best solution for their business, the answers they seek can often be elusive and well, a bit cloudy.
Public cloud seems like a cost-effective, turnkey solution and is filled with vendors whose names elicit a sense of familiarity and comfort. Yet users are increasingly finding hidden costs associated with the public cloud, along with inadequacies with security, flexibility and performance.
Private cloud looks to assuage the security fears associated with public cloud, and offers more customization, control and reliability. But it is often cost prohibitive, not to mention inefficient, to store all workloads in private cloud, which also requires the supervision and IT expertise that many businesses don’t have.
That brings us to hybrid cloud. Executed properly, hybrid cloud is the best of both worlds, leveraging the strengths of both public and private cloud while mitigating their weaknesses. That’s why, according to Gartner Group, 90 percent of enterprises will operate some sort of hybrid cloud by 2020.
And while hybrid cloud is becoming more popular for good reason, that’s not to say that it is a turnkey, set it and forget it type of solution. As hybrid cloud is evolving to be an IT design architecture and not just a workload specific solution, organizations are turning to trusted third parties who can help them architect a long-term, strategic solution and not just a band-aid quick fix. And more and more, partnering with an Edge cloud provider is becoming a critical part of a successful hybrid cloud deployment. Why is that?
- Edge cloud computing, which refers to the distributed IT architecture in which customer data is processed at the edge of the network—as close to the origination source as possible—allows for faster, more flexible growth.
- With the sheer volume of workloads that businesses deal with and the need for interconnectivity, latency is a huge deal for business application performance. A matter of milliseconds is a matter of productivity.
451 Research recently did a survey where 50% of organizations said that they wanted a single provider to manage their multi-sourced hybrid solutions. And the emergence of complex cloud deployments requires a different type of partner. Not just one that lives on the Edge, but one with the network experience and ability to architect, orchestrate and manage an organization’s hybrid cloud deployment.
At LightEdge, we refer to our solution set as the LightEdge Hybrid Cloud Solution Center. Think of it like a technology ecosystem, where public and private cloud, colocation, security and compliance, Edge computing and network configuration all interact, with LightEdge managing the different on-ramps, access points, and interoperability of multi-cloud implementations to ensure that everything is where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.
We provide 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. We take the guesswork out of the cloud, and bring it back down to Earth.
Intrigued? Well, you’re in luck, as we’ve written many more words about the importance of the emerging hybrid cloud environment (it’s here to stay), and how the LightEdge Hybrid Cloud Solution Center can help you find your perfect mate.
