Tag: hybrid cloud

When it comes to information technology, financial services and the public sector share some common traits. As highly regulated industries entrusted with sensitive data, they can be risk-averse and slow to innovate. At the same time, their focus on providing services to specialized audiences often means their existing IT infrastructures and datasets are siloed and architected around traditional centralized systems and networks.

Data is the lifeblood of every modern organization. Regardless of where a company may be in its own digital transformation journey, to operate successfully, today’s businesses need real-time access to insights about their revenues and costs, products, customers, partners, employees and more. That’s why enterprise databases are often considered the organizational crown jewels, and just a single minute of database downtime can cause widespread application outage and, eventually, translate into thousands of dollars of lost opportunity.

Cloud architects, who are often the nexus for critical decisions regarding data, applications, services and security, need to work closely with participants in any cloud project to determine the optimum key management strategy. This decision will be particularly important as an enterprise evolves its IT resources from an on-premises model to a widely distributed, multicloud model. A brief review of cloud evolution and the possible encryption key strategies that can be employed to highlight the pros and cons of various approaches.

New cloud applications and services on Microsoft Azure, such as Azure DevOps, Azure AI and Azure Blockchain Service, provide enterprises with a fast path to improved business agility, scale and competitiveness. But legacy network architectures can significantly hamper their ability to migrate workloads to Azure and experience highly performant hybrid applications.

One of the biggest decisions a business needs to make is where to put all of its data. Should you keep it on-premises, move it to cloud, or edge data centers where it is closer to users, applications and analytics? And once you’ve decided where it needs to reside, there are other questions to answer, such as: How can you move data securely between these different environments or integrate them to leverage analytics for the best possible insights?

In today’s digital world, legacy IT and network infrastructures can be huge inhibitors to enterprise cloud adoption. A Riverbed global survey of 1,000 business and IT decision makers in multiple industries reports that 97% of the respondents said, “Their legacy network infrastructure will have difficulty keeping pace with changing demands of cloud and hybrid networks.”

Cloud computing has unleashed a whole host of innovation, on-demand usage and collaboration options that companies are looking to take advantage of. However, ‘cloud’ is not a one-click panacea.

The second annual Global Interconnection Index (the GXI), a market study published by Equinix, projects Interconnection Bandwidth will grow at a 98% CAGR between 2017 and 2021.[ii]  One of the key factors driving this bandwidth increase is the rise of multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures, which spur a greater demand for private interconnection between businesses and the Cloud and IT Provider ecosystem.

Individually connecting multiple clouds over traditional wide area networking (WAN) infrastructures is operationally complex and costly, resulting in unreliable cross-cloud application interaction and performance, as well as poor scalability, visibility and control. Also, managing increasing data volumes from the cloud can’t be solved by public internet offloading, since doing so increases latency and risk.

We are enabling private and secure hybrid cloud interconnection to VMware Cloud on AWS via Platform Equinix®. Users can establish multiple virtual private connections between on-premises vSphere environments and VMware Cloud on AWS using AWS Direct Connect and the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric™).