Outbreak of the pandemic, leading to a countrywide lockdown last year, forced enterprises to operate remotely leveraging digital platforms. This is now becoming a norm challenging the existing on-prem data centre setups. Enterprises are adopting solutions powered by the cloud and complemented by Edge data centers. The growing popularity of third party data centers and hybrid multi-cloud setups has given way to a new paradigm of business operations focussing on efficiency and flexibility.
Growing Relevance of third-party Data Centers
Reliable, interconnected Data Centers and Cloud have become crucial to run operations with an increasingly distributed workforce, partners and customers. The biggest advantage this offers for enterprises is enabling them to bring down their expenditures from a CAPEX heavy model to an OPEX consumption model. Besides, it ensures greater business agility by enabling firms to scale as and when required; and let experts handle the complexity.
Disaster Recovery (DR) on the cloud is the easiest starting point for enterprises contemplating a cloud strategy. DR is usually on stand-by – it is not needed to be used, powered or managed all the time. Utilisation is often less than 10% in a year. However, it should be capable of being quickly engaged when an incident occurs. So, an in-house DR set up running 365 x 24 x 7 is not required. With DR on the cloud, you pay only when resources are used. Data uploads are free, only data downloads are chargeable, and hence DR on the cloud becomes a no-brainer. Easy to set up and, most importantly, easy to get management approval due to huge savings.
For a flexible and efficient hybrid cloud journey, the choice of the right hyper-connected Edge data center is critical. Apart from 99.999% uptime, the Edge data center of choice should provide interconnection platforms that offer direct connectivity to multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and host the required ecosystem of cloud, content, and network providers, like Telcos, Internet Service Providers, and Internet Exchanges; all within the data center campus. Enterprises can leverage multi cloud connectivity over Direct connections to CSPs over a cross connect, thus saving bandwidth costs and having flexibility to connect to cloud at 10Gbps without worrying about network connectivity. Cloud adoption is unlikely to deliver the best results unless supported by reliable, robust, secure, and low-latency network interconnection, preferably available in the same data center campus.
Take a Hybrid Approach
- Colocate in a highly reliable data center, which offers guaranteed uptime, under 24×7 supervision of experts.
- Choose a Data Center with Hyperconnection available for multiple CSPs along with availability of a Cloud Exchange service in the data center to move to a multi cloud strategy maximising redundancy and flexibility.
- Adopt a “DR on cloud” strategy with a Cloud Exchange within the Data Center which offers the flexibility to create DR with DC -DR connectivity over a LAN cross connect thus saving network expenses and also enhancing security and reliability by bypassing the public Internet
- Adopt a “Pay only on use” model for huge savings.
The strategy adopted by a leading Natural Gas distribution company in India is a case in point. The company shifted its in-house data center to GPX’s Tier IV DC to benefit from highly reliable Colocation Services. The company decided to deploy DR on the cloud, leveraging the presence of multiple CSPs, including AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud apart from 5 others at GPX DC campus. Their DC-DR connection was on a simple cross-connect over a LAN. No transport links were required, hence ZERO DC-DR bandwidth cost, another reason for huge savings for the customer.
GPX India is a Tier-IV Data Center offering colocation services with 99.999% uptime and an Interconnection Ecosystem of 8 CSPs, 12 Telcos, 170+ ISPs and 5 IXes, along with an “Open Cloud Exchange”, offering secure, high-speed, low latency network connectivity to multiple CSPs for Hybrid Multi-Cloud IT deployment.
Wrapping Up
As we gradually steer towards a post-Covid world that demands higher efficiency, cost optimization, flexibility, and business continuity assurance, architecting a robust cloud and data center roadmap would be essential to enterprises’ success.
