An interesting eWeek slideshow combines industry insight from a variety of sources, including Gartner, Dimensional Research and Equinix’s own Chris Sharp, to conclude that 2015 will be a watershed year for the hybrid cloud, or, more accurately, the multi-cloud. Among the slideshow’s predictions:
- By the end of 2015, enterprises will have most of their data storage, backup, disaster recovery and business intelligence apps delivered by cloud providers.
- Companies in every sector and geography will embrace the hybrid cloud.
- Companies looking to go global quickly will look to the cloud for fast ramp-up and low cost.
- Software companies will increasingly take a “Software-as-a-Service first” strategy.
- Unable to keep up with all the cloud offerings out there, companies will outsource the outsourcing of the cloud.
- To avoid vendor lock-in, enterprises will flock to third-party cloud exchanges for choice and interoperability.
- Enterprises and cloud providers alike will move to multitenant colocation data centers to leverage their proximity, fast interconnections and choice across a vast number of resources. Dimensional Research predicts that 45% of new cloud apps will be hosted by colocation providers.
- Multi-cloud enterprises will seek out direct, private connections to cloud providers, rather than MPLS or the public Internet, for both performance and security reasons.
These are exciting predictions, as they point to a whole new multi-cloud generation, or Cloud 2.0. Where enterprises once kept most applications and services in-house, getting their feet wet with individual connections to one or two cloud services, today they’re leaping into the multi-cloud ecosystem, pulling together a raft of cloud resources to fill just about any need quickly, with little or no upfront cost. According to eWeek, this highly agile multi-cloud ecosystem architecture will pave the way to adoption of new trends and markets, such as the Internet of Things and powerful cloud-based predictive analytics.
It’s clear from these predictions that the enterprises that win will embrace the unprecedented agility of the next multi-cloud generation. Equinix has known this for a long time. We’ve built one of the most flexible, elaborate interconnection platforms and cloud and network ecosystems across our more than 100 global Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. Enterprises looking to leverage the full power of a dense, multi-cloud ecosystem can partner with Equinix to get access to the capabilities they need, including:
Equinix is home to more than 500 global cloud providers. The Equinix Cloud Exchange, enables high-speed, direct, proximate interconnections to global cloud providers, including regional providers and major players, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Softlayer. Multi-cloud interactions over the exchange are fast to set up via virtual connectivity to multiple clouds through a single physical port. Ramp-up and multi-cloud management are simplified through a single Cloud Exchange API and developer’s portal.
Global Reach, with IBX locations in 33 global markets in 15 countries on five continents. This allows remote employees, partners and customers on any device to connect to and run multi-cloud applications and services fast, with dramatically lower latency than over a long distance enterprise MPLS or Internet VPN connection. The result is a superior user experience.
Network provider choice, delivering access to more than 1,000 public and private networks and network peering points, so you can mix and match interconnection solutions to reduce network hops, improve performance and accommodate any multi-cloud business need.
If you believe Gartner, Dimensional Research and eWeek, then multi-cloud is the way of the future for the agile enterprise. Equinix can provide you with many of the essential tools to take the leap.
Subscribe to the Equinix Blog