Modernize Your Business with Hybrid Multicloud

While COVID-19 has re-shaped every industry, one thing remains constant – long-term business success depends on innovation and growth. Companies that had the agility to meet rapidly changing customer expectations with new services and experiences were able to adapt quickly when the pandemic hit and accelerate their strategic advantage. This level of agility – taking minutes rather than months – would not be possible without digital infrastructure that leverages interconnection to remove the distance between IT services and users.

Hybrid multicloud is a major building block in these digital infrastructures. In a recent Equinix survey of 2,500 tech leaders across three regions, nearly three quarters (71%) of IT decision-makers said they want to move more IT functions to the cloud in the future and two-thirds of these want to do it within the next 12 months.

Accelerate your hybrid multicloud advantage with Equinix and Google Cloud

Equinix and Google Cloud have partnered together to make it easy for organizations to accelerate their IT modernization journey. The combination of Equinix Fabric^TM and Google Cloud Interconnect can help fast-track enterprise digital transformation, innovation and growth through agile and scalable hybrid multicloud services. Google Cloud Interconnect is directly deployed in 37 Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX^®) data center metros across three regions:

The video below demonstrates how to setup Google Cloud Interconnect via the Equinix Fabric portal:

Why Equinix and Google Cloud

Applications are at the core of a digital business. They allow organizations to deliver groundbreaking customer experiences, harness the power of breakthrough technologies and innovate at speed. But to truly benefit, companies need to ensure their applications are cloud-ready and support continuous delivery.

Read on to learn how enterprises are successfully leveraging Equinix Fabric and Google Cloud Interconnect (GCI) to digitally transform their business.

Application Modernization

Application modernization makes managing your business easier and drives growth, although it can be a can be a daunting task. Containers and platforms such as Kubernetes and Anthos help make it simple by providing a consistent platform to develop, deploy and manage applications across hybrid multicloud environments. With Google Cloud Anthos, enterprises can build and manage Kubernetes-based applications, regardless of whether they are on-premises, in Google Cloud or in other clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. This not only speeds up application development but makes it easy to automate and scale security across your digital infrastructure. GCI with Equinix Fabric enables this type of hybrid multicloud approach with reliable, low-latency and secure interconnection to and between on-premises, Google Cloud and other cloud services on Platform Equinix globally.

For example, a company with 200+ software products needed to deliver new features faster across multiple regions with reduced infrastructure costs. By leveraging GCI with Equinix Fabric, the company was able to deploy a modern hybrid Google Cloud Anthos architecture with seamless integration between their on-premises DevOps (JFrog CI/CD) environment, on-premises Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and GKE cloud cluster. High-speed, low latency interconnection between the three environments enabled the company to achieve 20x faster software development and delivery across multiple locations worldwide.

Data Warehouse Modernization

Deriving useful business intelligence depends on processing massive amounts of data from multiple sources, many of which are at the digital edge. As described in a previous article, “3 Trends Driving Artificial Intelligence Architectures,” this is shifting data management and processing to a “cloud-out and edge-in” hybrid multicloud architecture.

Data insights are important for a business to grow, but it can be challenging to support year-over-year large scale growth from internal and third-party data sources. You may have petabytes of data spread across complex on-premises data warehouse and storage technologies such as Teradata and Hadoop. With Google BigQuery, a cloud-based big data analytics service, you can keep sensitive data workloads on-premises while leveraging the processing power of Google Cloud for faster ad-hoc analysis, increased concurrent user counts and the ability to scale big data compute and storage independently. GCI with Equinix Fabric enables you to optimize traffic flow between your on-premises infrastructure and clouds, applications and data repositories at the digital edge. This enables you to grow business value with faster product and market insights.

As a case in point, a consumer goods company needed to transform its legacy analytics platform to support large scale data growth and increasing third party data sources. A hybrid cloud approach with GCI and Equinix Fabric enabled the company to integrate its existing on-premises data warehouse (Teradata and Hadoop) with cloud-based real time analytics at the petabyte scale, flexible data ingestion and on-demand scalability. This allowed for faster ad-hoc analysis and increased capacity while keeping sensitive data processing on-premises.

SAP on Google Cloud

Moving your on-premises SAP environment from multiple data centers to a public cloud can improve performance and reduce infrastructure costs. At the same time, it can introduce latency and security challenges. Leveraging low-latency, secure private interconnection between on-premises and cloud environments via GCI with Equinix Fabric enables faster time to value and the agility to scale on-demand throughout the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific regions. A hybrid cloud approach like this allows you to harness network, security, compute and storage best practices, so you can focus on custom enhancements in your SAP environment and ensure continued delivery of critical services and products during peak workload times.

For instance, a company focused on critical product distribution and infrastructure needed to reduce release cycles for their ERP/SAP environments from months to weeks. With high transacting SAP systems deployed across multiple data centers globally, latency, reliability and security were top concerns. Shifting to a hybrid cloud approach with GCI and Equinix Fabric on Platform Equinix enabled the company to leverage cloud-based best practices for network, security, compute and storage while reducing their resource and infrastructure costs. They can now deliver critical services and features much faster with decreased CAPEX.

API Management

APIs allow a specific audience to use data more quickly, easily and efficiently. End users want the same experience on their mobile, their tablet, their computer and in person. Businesses want to develop and deploy new services faster and easier by leveraging the data and intelligence across their markets to build new service and business models. Google’s API management platform, Apigee, can help businesses build and deliver apps faster, optimize costs and make smarter decisions based on analytics and machine learning. Combined with GCI and Equinix Fabric on Platform Equinix, this provides a globally consistent API management and edge data delivery platform to improve user experience and drive more business value.

For example, a professional services company needed to support an increasing number of customer and partner integrations. The company had over 150 client-facing applications that interfaced with its backend systems. A hybrid cloud approach leveraging Google’s API management platform Apigee via GCI and Equinix Fabric on Platform Equinix provided a common API management model with improved visibility, performance and control.

Together Equinix and Google Cloud can make hybrid multicloud a reality for you. Co-locating your on-premises workloads at Equinix and leveraging private interconnection to Google Cloud will give you the low-latency, secure bandwidth needed to transform your business.

Accelerate your digital advantage with Equinix and Google by signing up for a free trial of Google Cloud and Equinix Fabric.

You may also be interested in reading our other Google Cloud blogs.