Accelerate Your Digital Transformation Journey

As businesses are bracing for the long-term impact of COVID-19, one thing is becoming apparent: the ever-growing importance and reliance on the cloud. To stay competitive in today’s dynamic business environment, a company’s IT infrastructure must deliver faster technology solutions to adapt to changing demands placed on it by both the business and its employees.

Now-a-days, enterprises aim to leverage cloud to maximize market value. Cloud aspirations are related to improved business results, such as top-line sales growth and the opportunity to invest in innovation by more strategically allocating digital spending. But one of the biggest challenges is mastering exploding cloud usage. Many enterprises currently have presence across multiple clouds, that best suits their application and business requirements by deploying a blend of on-premises and public cloud infrastructures. Getting hybrid infrastructure to integrate and work reliably, and ensuring top security and SLAs across multiple clouds, is getting more complex every day.

Customers are on a constant lookout for effective ways to scale digitally, embracing flexible approaches with agile methodologies to accelerate their cloud-led digital transformation. One of the core enablers for driving this transformation process is hybrid multicloud architectures. And a digital transformation strategy for any enterprise that includes hybrid multicloud needs to answer some critical questions:

1. How do we find the right hybrid multicloud mix?
2. How can we provide greater choice and compute flexibility to internal and external consumers?
3. How will we future-proof enterprise infrastructures that are easily scalable, with the right interconnection planning and execution?

Seamless hybrid multicloud deployment with HCL ADC (powered by Equinix)

Enterprises are trying to piece things together as they come along with new business models, technologies and tools in their hybrid multicloud journey, which is just not working for many organizations. In fact, when it comes to doing cloud right, you need to have a solid framework upon which to build. Great partnerships can change the game when it comes to creating optimal digital infrastructures. HCL and Equinix have strategically joined forces to bring to market and enable a broad portfolio of products and services encompassing data centers, networking, IoT and security, etc. We continue to invest in resource development through training, centers of excellence, labs, and joint go-to-market activities to help our customers stay ahead of the curve in their digital journey. Intrinsically this means developing a shared understanding and value proposition.

One of our joint development efforts created HCL ADC (Adaptive Data Center), a digital transformation deployment model based on a standard reference architecture. It leverages Equinix global platform, Equinix Fabric™ software-defined interconnection, and dense, interconnected network and cloud ecosystems to deliver next-gen enterprise infrastructure, applications and services globally.

HCL and Equinix Adaptive Data Center End State

HCL ADC is a globally consistent, ready to consume hybrid cloud solution that delivers a connected cloud with a single management portal and integrated hybrid orchestration engines. It is powered by Platform Equinix^® with Equinix Fabric, which is completely programmable, allowing you to transfer the intelligence and control from hardware to software. This enables optimal flexibility and scalability using PaaS/CaaS solutions and an API-based DevOps platform.

Fully managed, single-tenant IaaS delivered through multiple Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX^®) data centers helps to achieve performance, control and advanced security of private cloud with the ease of public cloud. It provides a consumption based as-a-service model built on IaaS capabilities, allowing optimal choice and flexibility while removing the need of upfront CAPEX.

Prominent use cases for creating agile and flexible digital infrastructure

HCL ADC on Platform Equinix delivers a model reference architecture that helps rapidly achieve the use cases IT organizations need to address today’s hybrid multicloud environments that can be maximized by enterprises looking for an agile, service-based digital infrastructure. Leading use cases include:

1. VMware cloud on AWS/Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud: Customers desire tight integration between on-premises and cloud services for their applications, as the applications use the same APIs irrespective of whether they are running on-premises or in public cloud. APIs enable multiple teams to use the same deployment model and management interfaces across hybrid multicloud architectures. HCL ADC with Equinix Fabric seamlessly supports this blended approach to run application workloads across VMware-based hybrid multicloud environments, extending optimized access to comprehensive native cloud services, while addressing data security, compliance, and governance.
2. Workload flexibility and availability: Equipped with elastic data scaling to respond to real-time events, businesses can consume HCL ADC for private cloud services, while a public cloud could be used for scaling up on demand or disaster recovery (DR). For example, an e-commerce customer can flex-up during holiday season or a black Friday sale depending on their designated requirement, while ensuring that their services are always available during high-peak sales periods.
3. Self-service portal: This can be thought of as the “electronic front door” to the IT
   organization, which is vital to a consumer community that is “always on, always connected.” It empowers the internal/external customers to register, request services, find information, and resolve issues. For example, administrative functions such as provisioning a virtual machine (VM), decommissioning a VM, or allocating storage can be easily fulfilled via a self-service customer portal, resulting in faster turnaround and leaner operations.
4. Switcher data center: This use case is an easy win for businesses that have a clear strategy of moving all workloads to the public cloud, even if their current applications are not cloud-ready. They can leverage the HCL ADC service as a parking space for the next 24/36/48 months to run their existing applications while they continue to make them cloud-ready.

These use cases demonstrate how HCL ADC on Platform Equinix with Equinix Fabric not only delivers agility, reliability, flexibility but also integrates multiple infrastructure delivery services into a scalable IT ecosystem. By deploying business applications on HCL ADC at Equinix IBX facilities, organizations deploy digital infrastructures with greater agility and flexibility ꟷ from application deployment, cloud transition, migration, consulting and system integration operation services.

Currently, the HCL ADC offering is available in EMEA in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London and Stockholm, but soon will be rolled out in Equinix IBX data centers in APAC and the Americas. This paves the way for future-proof hybrid multicloud infrastructures that accelerate the delivery of more automated and responsive services that will deliver value to your IT organization, business and users.

Learn more by reading how to accelerate your journey to hybrid multicloud.