The vast majority of enterprises are pursuing a hybrid multicloud strategy, but optimizing deployments for cost, performance and security can be complex. It requires constantly adapting to change, including emerging competitive threats, new technologies, shifting customer preferences and greater regulatory complexity. As these changing conditions arise, businesses need to reevaluate where they host their workloads to ensure they’re meeting their requirements around security, performance and cost-efficiency.
Even if you start with the best of intentions, it’s easy to fall into vendor lock-in. Moving workloads from one cloud to another or splitting workloads between clouds can cause operational headaches, so it sometimes feels easier just to leave things where they are.
A successful approach to hybrid multicloud is all about maintaining flexibility, not only in terms of which workloads you move between clouds and on-premises environments, but also within your organization. You’ll need to deploy the right hybrid multicloud networking solutions to get that flexibility.
Ensuring alignment across teams
One reason hybrid multicloud is so difficult is that it requires getting different teams on the same page. For instance, if executives decide they need to reduce IT infrastructure spend, the IT team needs to execute the change, which can be operationally disruptive. There needs to be two-way communication between IT and the line of business to ensure everyone’s expectations are aligned on budgets, resource allocation and timelines.
For example, cloud migrations often involve moving petabytes of data, and doing that with low-bandwidth connectivity means the project would take months. This naturally means months of continued infrastructure and connectivity fees from the cloud, as well as months of labor devoted to managing the project.
Having the right multicloud networking solutions in place can drastically speed up cloud migrations. For instance, a Network as a Service (NaaS) solution such as Equinix Fabric® can help enterprises dial up the exact connections they need across every stage of their migration. Since Equinix Fabric offers private interconnections, it’s a great alternative to migrating data via the public internet, with its higher costs, unpredictable performance and data privacy issues.
In addition, Equinix Fabric includes Fabric Cloud Router, a virtual cloud router that simplifies multicloud networking. For any use case that requires routing traffic between two clouds, such as supporting applications deployed across multiple clouds, Fabric Cloud Router enables a direct link between the local cloud availability zones. This helps reduce latency and costs by removing the need to hairpin traffic through core data centers. Ultimately, keeping cloud traffic closer to end users at your network’s edge can lead to a better user experience.
Cloud-to-cloud routing at the digital edge
Multicloud is a moving target
There are several factors you must consider to help optimize your workload placement, and each of these factors will impact how you build your hybrid multicloud network infrastructure.
Geographic reach
Where are your end users located? Which providers, cloud or otherwise, could help you reach those places the fastest? Do you need to keep your data within specific countries to meet data sovereignty requirements? Having access to the right cloud on-ramps in the right places can help you connect to your cloud environments and deliver data quickly and reliably to your end users, wherever they are.
Costs
If you’re storing terabytes of data in the cloud, the egress costs can be hefty. Consider the case of a sports team that was using the cloud to store video for every player in the team’s history. Every time an end user pulled up one of those videos, they were paying egress fees. By moving some of those workloads into a private cloud at Equinix, the team was able to reduce egress fees significantly.
Security
Some enterprises assume they have to choose between a strong security posture and flexible hybrid multicloud networking, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Tools like virtual firewalls can be deployed in minutes, allowing enterprises to run their security policies closer to the end user.
Use case: Large one-time cloud migration
Sometimes enterprises have no choice but to complete a very large cloud migration quickly. When this is the case, they need to figure out how to move all that data in a cost-effective manner, without sacrificing application performance.
This was the situation that Uber was facing when they came to Equinix. The rideshare company needed to migrate 6.5 petabytes of data to Google Cloud. To avoid high egress fees on the public internet, they knew they needed a private networking solution. They were also paying duplicate storage costs to two different clouds during the migration, so they wanted to finish the project as quickly as possible. Finally, they needed a solution that would ensure their network backbone didn’t get overwhelmed by migration traffic.
Using Equinix Fabric Cloud Router, Uber was able to spin up the on-demand connection they needed in less than a day. This helped them meet their aggressive timeline to complete the migration. Since Fabric Cloud Router is a virtual solution that’s available on demand, the company didn’t have to invest in physical network infrastructure or sign long-term contracts for bandwidth. They simply scaled up the capacity they needed, and then turned down the service once the migration was complete.
Learn more about Uber’s experience with cloud-to-cloud data migration.
Interconnected infrastructure help enterprises thrive
Hybrid multicloud is all about enabling enterprises to optimize costs, enhance performance and unlock innovative applications. But businesses can’t achieve these benefits if they’re held back by network complexity. The right multicloud networking solutions reduce this complexity to ensure data and workloads are able to move where they need to go, quickly and reliably.
To learn more about how multicloud networking solutions can help enterprises achieve their business objectives, read the white paper Thriving with a hybrid multicloud strategy.
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