Delivering High Performance & Security with Hybrid Cloud

When it comes to implementing hybrid cloud architectures, organizations with existing data centers have a couple of options to connect to a cloud provider(s): 1) provision a private network circuit or 2) use a site-to-site virtual private network.

There are pros and cons to each option. Option 1 provides better security and higher performance since it is a private link. However, it can be expensive, even more so if a second connection is needed for redundancy. On the other hand, option 2 is easier and cheaper to set up, but it is less secured and lower performing because data has to travel across the internet.

In either case, something important to consider is the proximity of the data to the network edge of the desired cloud provider(s). I recently spoke with Vaughn Eisler, director of business development at Equinix, about how hybrid cloud architectures solve customer pain points such as cloud lock-in, expensive costs to take data out of the cloud, and lack of data mobility.

Such architectures involve operating some applications with on-premises infrastructure and/or some applications in the cloud, all while maintaining the bulk of the data on-premises. Because the data is not in the cloud, we avoid cloud lock-in and egress costs. It naturally improves data mobility because the data can simply be attached to a secondary or tertiary cloud provider without having to export it from the primary cloud provider first.

The Cloud On-Ramp

In my conversation with Vaughn, he stated that one of the most effective approaches to hybrid cloud deployment is to place the data at a cloud-adjacent location. These are colocation data centers where cloud providers are running their edge networking infrastructure. They are essentially cloud on-ramps.

Simply by physically locating the data closer to the cloud on-ramps, customers can ensure that their applications can achieve 1 millisecond latency to and from major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. Also, the connections between these on-ramps and the cloud providers are private and high-speed. This solves the security problem of sending data across the internet.

There are 250+ such on-ramp colocation data centers available under the Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix program. These locations are spread across 70 metros in 31 countries. With such extensive worldwide coverage, Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix provides an attractive way to implement a hybrid cloud architecture.

It fits a lot of use cases: Customers with an existing data center that is too far from their cloud provider’s network edge; customers looking to reduce their data center footprint; and customers needing a secondary data center with minimal startup costs in order to meet disaster recovery or backup requirements.

Related

• Building True Cloud Efficiency with Hybrid Cloud Architectures
• Video: How IT Gets Done