Taking the Right Approach to Cloud Migration

Cloud migration is a journey with rewards and risks. To take full advantage, plan for this journey by establishing your cloud maturity model, setting goals and milestones, developing a cloud strategy, and then running it like an ongoing project. There will always be more applications to modernize and new requirements with the continuous evolution of the business.

Next, establish a framework for planning, process prioritization and achieving early returns and use it as a baseline for designing and executing your future migration activities that, more than likely, will include establishing a hybrid multicloud digital infrastructure.

Securing connectivity to multicloud

Most enterprises have high-performance workloads they want to run on a dedicated physical platform while supporting edge workloads that require integration with multiple clouds. That’s why almost all enterprise migrations are hybrid and call for a scalable, robust and secure platform to support an organization’s cloud migration pipeline. Additionally, organizations must ensure security and regulatory and data compliance across their digital infrastructure footprint.

Regardless of the approach organizations take toward cloud migration, the need to ensure secure and dedicated connectivity between their current digital infrastructure and target hybrid multicloud environment cannot be overlooked.

Simplifying hybrid multicloud integration and workload migration

Hybrid multicloud is the best approach if an enterprise wants to meet their current and future performance, security, cost and compliance requirements. Interconnection to multiple digital ecosystem partners provides seamless workload migration to and from on-premises, colocation, cloud and the edge.

Equinix Fabric™, our software-defined interconnection service, makes digital infrastructure and customer and partner ecosystems immediately available for businesses to seamlessly connect to any cloud, partner, or even their own infrastructure in seconds. Equinix Fabric accelerates hybrid multicloud application deployments using direct and secure, dedicated interconnection on Platform Equinix®, the world’s largest data center platform. The Forrester Consulting report “The Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Equinix”[i] found that Equinix Fabric customers could reduce latency by a minimum of 30% and lower cloud connectivity and network traffic costs by 60% to 70%.

Network Edge provides virtual network services that businesses select, deploy and connect at the edge in minutes, with no additional hardware requirements. Equinix Metal™ is an automated, interconnected, low-latency bare metal-as-a-service that provides high-performance and scalable computing and storage capacity. IT organizations can deploy automated single-tenant bare metal servers in minutes, without the cost and complication of a virtualization layer. Equinix Fabric is integrated into Network Edge and Equinix Metal on Platform Equinix. Read Changing the Way Digital Business Connects to learn more.

According to Forrester Consulting, Interconnection, which enables enterprises to move out of owned islands of data and into interconnected hubs of third-party services located at the ‘edge,’ or at close physical proximity to the users of these services, is quickly becoming table stakes to achieving digital transformation[i].

Equinix has created a best-of-breed hybrid multicloud architecture by locating directly next to leading public clouds and networks in our Equinix IBX® sites. This proximity to cloud providers enables businesses to communicate with one or more cloud providers privately and securely via dedicated “on-ramps” using Equinix Fabric—without going over the public internet. In fact, Equinix has 40% of the industry’s cloud on-ramps, more than any other interconnection provider. This cloud adjacency model helps enterprises use the cloud as an extension of their data centers. To learn more, read How to Converse in Cloud: Cloud Adjacent Infrastructure.

Leveraging APIs for automating network provisioning

Businesses can save time and optimize infrastructure deployment by automating interconnections among on-premises digital infrastructure and multiple clouds with Equinix Fabric, Equinix APIs and Terraform scripts. With Terraform, you can templatize deployments of migration circuits and simplify hybrid multicloud management and orchestration and build scalable digital infrastructure. For more, read the APIs: The Foundation for Innovation blog.

Grow your business by collaborating with an interconnected Equinix cloud ecosystem

Equinix offers the industry’s broadest choice in cloud service providers (CSPs), including partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud and other leading cloud providers such as SAP Cloud Platform.

AWS—AWS Direct Connect helps businesses orchestrate applications and data across multiple locations. Their AWS Dedicated Connections Model enables business to scale high-speed, virtual AWS interconnection and supports private connectivity to AWS in Equinix locations globally.

VMware Cloud on AWS—Private connectivity to VMware Cloud on AWS via AWS Direct Connect at Equinix IBX data centers provides high levels of speed and security and ease of mobility of IT infrastructure between private and public cloud resources and services. For more details, read Equinix, VMware and AWS are Re-Inventing Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures.

Microsoft Azure—When combined with Equinix Fabric, Azure ExpressRoute™ enables seamless, on-demand, direct access to Microsoft Azure, providing the best possible latency and performance.

SAP on Azure—Platform Equinix® with Azure ExpressRoute and Equinix Fabric™ deliver the private interconnection and infrastructure building blocks SAP customers can use to migrate to an SAP S/4 HANA environment and accelerate ERP deployments. Read Equinix Speeds SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure to learn more.

Google Cloud—Greater than 40% of Google Cloud Interconnect on-ramps are with Equinix, making it easier for customers to leverage low-latency and high-bandwidth networks to safely migrate applications and data to Google Cloud.

Oracle Cloud—Platform Equinix delivers seamless private connectivity to Oracle Cloud and provides cloud adjacent access to all major cloud service providers to enable reliable, high performance and secure connectivity for Oracle Exadata systems.

How Cloud Migration with Equinix and our Partners Simplifies and Speeds the Journey

Increasingly, businesses are bypassing the internet and using Equinix Fabric on Platform Equinix for private interconnections with cloud vendors to migrate and extend their virtualized workloads to the cloud. Using Network Edge and Equinix Metal to place latency-sensitive application workloads at the edge—near users, clouds, data warehouses and technology partner ecosystems—improves application performance and customer experience.

To learn more, download the Equinix Fabric data sheet.

[1] “The Total Economic Impact™ of Equinix,” Forrester Consulting, April, 2019.