Supercharging cloud security, reliability and scalability via interconnection

The cloud promises enterprises a lot. Greater cost savings, better performance, an enriched user experience and increased business agility are often cited as the main drivers for cloud adoption.

At the same time, many enterprises expect much less from the cloud when it comes to ensuring data safety and compliance. In fact, IDG reports that two in three enterprises consider security concerns a key challenge to implementing their cloud strategies.

Given this potentially volatile mix of high expectations and serious concerns, cloud and network service providers and their enterprise customers are turning to new, direct interconnection strategies, as prescribed in the Equinix report, "The Home of the Interconnected Cloud: Where Service Providers and Enterprises Meet to Grow and Innovate Together," to optimize their cloud migration strategies and give them greater peace of mind.

Harnessing the Interconnected Cloud

Enterprises need to consider interconnection first when approaching their cloud strategies because the reality is, cloud success can't happen without interconnection. The following are three proven ways harnessing direct and secure interconnection optimizes enterprise cloud strategies:

Better Security – Private, direct connectivity between enterprises and cloud service providers (CSPs), and among multiple CSPs, reduces the "cyber-attack surface." It eliminates the risks of backhauling cloud traffic to remote data centers via the Internet or over multiple "hops" in a long-haul network.

Organizations can also deliver security services locally, closer to users, data and clouds. And data residency and compliance can be maintained by interconnecting cloud-based services, such as real-time analytics, next to local data, keeping it where it was created.

More Reliability – According to the Dimensional Research survey, more than half of enterprises plan to migrate storage backup and disaster recovery applications to the cloud. Direct and secure interconnection between private storage and hybrid cloud backup and recovery applications keeps more sensitive storage safe, while increasing the performance of backup and recovery processes over private, high-speed, low-latency connections.

Private interconnection to the cloud can also provide the redundancy required for safe disaster recovery, if there is an outage at an on-premises IT infrastructure. It can even enable reliable disaster recovery capabilities between two different cloud services for greater application high availability and business continuity.

Improved Scalability – To realize the enormous scalability benefits of the cloud, interconnections to cloud infrastructures need to be as flexible, agile and scalable as the cloud services they support. Fast and automated provisioning via direct and secure virtualized connections makes "spinning up and spinning down" cloud services easier to manage and control.

And dynamic access to the right clouds enables the critical balancing act that allocates, on demand, any type or size workload to the most high-performance and cost-effective cloud services.

The Interconnected Cloud on Platform Equinix

Service providers and enterprises alike can derive big business benefits from an interconnection-first approach when it comes to their cloud adoption strategies.

Article by Tony Bishop, Equinix blog network