Enterprises “All In” on Public Cloud? Not so fast!

As businesses digitally transform, the enterprise is making significant investments in the public cloud for initiatives and use cases, which include application portfolio migration and modernization, distributed services and security, elastic capacity and highly available data. These are just a handful of the enterprise investments in public cloud.

As enterprises traverse cloud adoption, there are common challenges they encounter. Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report ranks those challenges between enterprises and SMBs, which are amplified for larger organizations.[i]

There is growing evidence to support increased interest in and adoption of private (and hybrid) cloud deployments as an increasing number of enterprises repatriate their initial cloud investments and shift back to on-premises infrastructure. Cloud repatriation is helping drive both hybrid and private cloud growth. As cloud adoption continues to accelerate at a rapid pace, how do organizations address the complexities and resource challenges of public cloud migration while fully harnessing the benefits these deployment models?

The answer: Digital transformation from code to cloud, and data center to database from CDW Amplified Services and powered by Equinix.

CDW delivers the velocity you require

As one of the largest technology integrators in the world, CDW provides cloud solution design and managed services to thousands of customers in all industries of all sizes. In support of the extensive portfolio of products and services the company offers, CDW has established three areas of focus for their enterprise customers:

• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
• Hybrid Storage and Backup
• Private Cloud and the Programmable Data Center

These solutions optimize secure, on demand connectivity for the most demanding multicloud architectures.

A key part of this portfolio expansion is CDW’s suite of “Amplified Services”, a collection of fully managed IT services that comply with a “Design-Orchestrate-Manage” lifecycle management model.

In addition, CDW’s Digital Velocity Solutions practice provides expert support for deploying infrastructure in public cloud and/or edge private and hybrid clouds in highly automated and programmable designs through DevOps acceleration and containerized application development and delivery.

Digital Velocity offers advisory, consulting and development services. The Digital Velocity team of professionals provides services to customers across all major cloud platforms and private hybrid cloud environments. Digital Velocity also provides expertise for the buildout of private cloud deployments and is hard at work developing a private cloud as-a-service offering.

Source: CDW

In tandem with Equinix, CDW’s Amplified Services provide flexible, customized end-to-end technology services to their customers. From configuration and maintenance to advanced engagements across infrastructure, workspace, security and support, CDW can relieve their customers’ IT teams of many day-to-day responsibilities so they can focus on higher value innovative tasks rather than routine – and time consuming – IT management. This allows those organizations to maximize their IT investments and deliver real value for their customers.

Of particular relevance given the market trend toward repatriation of select cloud workloads, CDW’s Amplified Infrastructure Services portfolio provides solutioning for data center migration, networking and optimization as well as hybrid cloud and SDN services. Just as not all workloads will move to and reside permanently in the cloud, neither will all workloads be repatriated to private clouds in private data centers. There will most certainly be a rebalancing of IT workloads as the pendulum shifts toward an equilibrium between public and private clouds. CDW’s expertise in both physical data center and multi-cloud implementations, as well as strong relationships with key providers in these spaces, makes CDW an ideal partner for organizations that are considering or who are already in the process of rebalancing their IT infrastructures by repatriating certain workloads from public to private cloud.

With a team of seasoned engineers and business leaders, CDW brings their experience of implementing some of the most complex digital projects for globally recognized companies, while helping enterprises of all kinds correctly implement cloud deployments through software-defined infrastructure technologies avoiding costly mistakes and repatriation.

Equinix provides the digital infrastructure platform for CDW service delivery

As a CDW Premier Partner, Equinix’s digital infrastructure platform provides the foundation for CDW services delivery. With a full portfolio of software-defined interconnection and edge services, such as Equinix Fabric™, Network Edge and Equinix Metal™, Equinix helps further enable the innovative solutions capabilities of CDW  by providing cloud adjacent architecture at the enterprise’s digital edge.

Through its global metro edge footprint, Equinix provides the digital “glue” between an enterprise’s remote edge (locations, users and devices) and the cloud edge. Equinix is the aggregated meeting place where a customer’s private network meets with a business ecosystems, inclusive of more than 2,950 public cloud and IT service providers, 1,800+ network services, and the majority of commonly used SaaS and digital and business ecosystem partners — all only a mouse click away. This environment has enabled data traffic at Equinix in excess of 17 Tbps between enterprises on public exchanges, along with hundreds of available peers and partners on Equinix Fabric.

Source: Equinix

Among the many solutions CDW has delivered on Equinix’s global platform, this is where CDW has developed a software-defined Private Cloud as-a Service (PCaaS) offering to address an enterprise’s need to deploy private infrastructure and platform services adjacent to Equinix’s interconnection and edge services portfolio and dense ecosystems. Equinix’s global data center and second-to-none cloud on-ramp footprint, coupled with Equinix Metal, automated, interconnected bare metal-as-a service, is critical to the PCaaS design.

Overall, the synergies created by the complementary services of CDW and Equinix provide complete end-to-end solutions for the enterprise found nowhere else in the marketplace.

Learn more about CDW and Equinix services and solutions.

Thanks to Mike Walker and Bill Ellis, Senior Global Solutions Architects at Equinix, for their editorial contributions to this article.

[i] Flexera, “State of the Cloud Report 2021.”