Your cloud strategy has the potential to allow you to lower your operational and capital expenditures while improving your business agility to meet customer expectations. Cloud adoption is growing rapidly as a way to speed the release of new products, reduce investments in hardware and IT management, and meet changing market demands.
Increasingly, the discussion around a cloud strategy is no longer only about on-premise versus cloud or even public versus private cloud. It should include a consideration of a data center, offering the ability to combine colocation, managed, and cloud services as an anchor for a well-rounded infrastructure. It improves security and data privacy over basic cloud environments while offering management and expertise around compliance that an in-house team likely cannot match.
The data center offers a complete infrastructure that allows for a mix-and-match approach to each workload with the infrastructure best able to support it. There are additional reasons that enterprises may want to consider a data center foundation:
Not Every Application Is Designed for Hyperscale Cloud: While some applications have been rewritten for cloud, there are many legacy applications that require a migration over time and a data center offers that flexibility.
Containerization: This option is becoming a popular choice for giving users the benefits and flexibility of the cloud, without being locked in. Containerization can make colocation in a data center more secure and compliant, giving enterprises a balance of flexibility and security.
Centralized Management: Today’s data centers often offer their own private cloud platforms, as well as colocation and on-ramps to public cloud platforms, giving enterprises the ability to utilize the best infrastructure for each application or workload.
Simplifying IT Management: Even when enterprises decide to maintain an on-premise data center, the cost and complexity of retrofitting or rebuilding is high. It’s more cost-effective to utilize space in a modern data center, while also opening up options for utilizing cloud platforms for applications requiring them.
DRaaS and Redundancy: Disaster relief as a service (DRaaS) gets a boost from the inclusion of a data center in a cloud strategy. Even cloud platforms with some level of built-in redundancy still experience outages, and data centers add another layer of resiliency to a recovery strategy.
Managed Services: While the bigger cloud platforms offer a host of self-service options, technical support can be found wanting. A modern data center offers managed services that cover not only onboarding and migration, but also continuing management.
Compliance and Security: Particularly for those in financial services, health care, or government agencies, security and compliance remain a central concern when migrating to the cloud. A data center operator provides management services for the extensive compliance controls necessary in these industries, with complete reporting and analytics for simplifying the auditing and reporting associated with compliance and security.
Contact us at Cloud Source for more information about how choosing a data center may provide resiliency and management benefits for your cloud strategy.