IT leaders are reevaluating their digital infrastructure capabilities in an environment where business needs are constantly evolving. Organizations are faced with a prime opportunity to rapidly expand their businesses within their local markets and on the global stage. However, the decision to go global depends greatly on their digital infrastructure capabilities and balancing operations on the edge and the public cloud.
Currently, a majority of organizations that have opted to operate through traditional on-premises infrastructure or public cloud infrastructure are considering adopting a hybrid approach using Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS). With a greater need for expanded digital abilities on a tighter IT budget, IT managers must fine-tune a balance between cost, performance and reliability along with security that meets their compliance requirements. Now is the time for visionary digital leaders to capitalize on the opportunity to modernize and optimize their infrastructure leveraging new digital and physical tools.
Leveraging bare metal as a service for growth and innovation
As the spotlight shines on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT), digital companies of all sizes are joining the race to make use of this innovative technology to achieve business expansion goals. However, succeeding in these projects requires substantial processing capabilities to handle complex algorithms and vast datasets. Enterprise Strategy Group shows that 52% of organizations have chosen to repatriate cloud workloads to on-premises infrastructure for reasons that included management decisions, data security issues, higher-than-expected costs and limited access to new technologies.
Amidst the rush to embrace cloud computing, hastily migrating all workloads to public cloud infrastructure has presented its fair share of challenges. Unfortunately, many organizations have overlooked the crucial step of assessing technical requirements and determining which workloads would truly benefit from a cloud environment. As a result, certain workloads were relocated without proper consideration, leading to suboptimal performance or the need for extensive refactoring to achieve cloud optimization. These oversights are becoming increasingly relevant for organizations looking to implement and field their own digital services.
This is where bare metal servers come into play. BMaaS offers a unique mix of benefits, supporting businesses in speeding up their time-to-value, lowering the overall operational complexity of running on-premises infrastructure and mitigating the soaring costs of unpredictable cloud pricing models. When dealing with sensitive data such as customer information or proprietary datasets, developers can create a secure environment with bare metal, maintaining complete control over security measures to safeguard valuable data from unauthorized access and potential breaches.
Shifting to a pay-per-use bare metal infrastructure approach can expand the range of digital capabilities and agility of enterprises with low entry barriers. Business leaders in Asia-Pacific will have the flexibility to scale up and down based on their needs, allowing for reduced operational complexity and avoiding the spiraling costs and unpredictability of placing workloads and data in the cloud. These benefits are amplified as the organization continues to scale as IT and expansion initiatives can be further accelerated by shifting costs to future quarters, enabling the deployment of a greater amount of infrastructure in the present. This in turn frees up personnel to focus on strategic tasks and speeds up the adoption of new infrastructure capabilities.
BMaaS is also an ideal infrastructure option for companies embarking on cloud modernization strategies. They provide the power and security of dedicated servers while offering some of the versatility and flexibility found in cloud-based virtual machines. This unique combination empowers businesses to optimize their infrastructure, seamlessly adapting to changing demands as they scale their operations.
Seamless integration of cloud and edge with Equinix Metal
Equinix Metal® is an interconnected, globally distributed solution for digital businesses in developing regions looking for rapidly deployable digital infrastructure to expand their reach with a unified cloud and edge strategy. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, Equinix Metal delivers near cloud-like agility for workloads on low-latency, highly available bare-metal servers at a cost that is up to 72% lower than build-it-yourself (BIY) infrastructure and up to 56% lower than public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
Equinix Metal provides much-needed control and low-latency connections to users at the digital edge with the option to rapidly connect in three different ways: bare metal to cloud, bare metal to colocation and bare metal to Internet. As an operational consumption-based IT model, businesses can rapidly deploy digital infrastructure so they can deliver value faster to customers on-demand, meet the growing performance demands of modern applications and support organizational digital transformation strategies. Customers will have access to a cloud-like experience that comes with greater choice and control than they can obtain from the traditional cloud computing model of shared infrastructure. Enterprise Strategy Group also found that Equinix Metal was able to provide a 98% to 202% ROI depending on whether the organization and workload-dependent revenue benefits and downtime savings were applicable.
Deployments of data and workloads on edge devices or local servers rather than cloud-based processing bring these powerful capabilities closer to the primary source where data is generated, resulting in efficient processing, real-time analysis and reduced dependence on Internet connectivity. Localizing processing addresses data privacy and security concerns since information is not required to be transmitted to the cloud. By adopting a hybrid infrastructure approach, enterprises can create a distributed system that combines Equinix Metal and cloud computing. This hybrid solution delivers the robust computing power of cloud intelligence with the autonomy of the edge to tackle critical tasks effectively. Equinix Metal not only reduces entry barriers for enterprises seeking to expand. The solution also enables the establishment of new partnerships with a wide range of partners and cloud service providers through the software-defined interconnection of Equinix Fabric® and the flexibility to utilize Equinix Network Edge for rapid integration of branded virtual network services whenever necessary.
With Equinix Metal enterprises can rely on the predictable performance of bare metal for both modern and legacy critical workloads without requiring a dedicated team to maintain and operate on-premise or colocation infrastructure. Bare metal shines in a hybrid IaaS approach on an OpEx model. Customers can also better meet sustainability initiatives, no longer having to worry about the disposal of older hardware knowing that Equinix will repurpose it in other offerings. Read this report by Enterprise Strategy Group to learn about how the trickle-down benefits of Equinix Metal can help your organization achieve business expansion, digital transformation and sustainability goals.
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