As adoption and use of public cloud services accelerates, carrier-neutral service providers have moved quickly to create new offerings that benefit hybrid cloud scenarios, says James Thomason, Chief Technology Officer of HyperGrid, the enterprise cloud service company that provides public-cloud services on-premises through HyperCloud.
“Typically, these offerings provide a direct interconnection between private infrastructure owned and operated by customers within a carrier-neutral facility and public cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure,” he explains. “Direct connection models improve public cloud for enterprises by reducing application latencies and lowering bandwidth costs. However, traditional barriers to public cloud adoption remain in direct connect models.”
Thomason points out that data-intensive applications are often so sensitive to latency that performance suffers significantly on public cloud services. The multi-tenant architecture of public cloud services can introduce overhead, along with unpredictable degradations of service quality.
Together with security and regulatory compliance challenges, these characteristics can make public cloud unsuitable for a large variety of enterprise use cases.
“By and large, the success of public cloud is built upon a fundamental shift of responsibility for infrastructure, from internal IT teams to the external service provider. This transition has enabled IT to focus more on innovation activities, versus the undifferentiated heavy lifting of maintaining IT infrastructure. The key failing of private cloud solutions is that they still rely on a do-it-yourself approach, leaving responsibility for building and scaling infrastructure with internal IT teams,” he adds.
According to a recent survey of CIOs by Harvey-Nash, IT leaders remain overwhelmingly dissatisfied with their private cloud initiatives.
Today, a new model for cloud computing is emerging, so-called True Cloud services. True Cloud, says Thomason, combines the best characteristics of public cloud, together with the benefits of owning a private data centre. “In True Cloud services, customers are given physically isolated infrastructure resources that are owned and operated by the cloud provider. Just like regular public cloud services, customers pay for True Cloud as they consume cloud resources and have the ability to burst beyond their committed capacity.”
Thomason predicts that soon the demand for high-performance computing capacity at the edge of the network is expected to rise, owing to the inexorable increase of Internet of things (IoT), mobile and other edge computing devices. “As this shift happens, the economics and performance characteristics of public cloud services will become undesirable for these use cases. The emergence of True Cloud, along with the expected rise in demand for edge computing use cases, represents an unprecedented opportunity for carrier-neutral service providers to increase their value to customers in the cloud era.”
He lists the benefits of this scenario as:
• Dedicated infrastructure just like private cloud;
• True public cloud consumption model supporting on-demand and reserved instances;
• High-performance cloud capacity directly connected to customer’s private data centre infrastructure;
• Lower costs for customers versus traditional public cloud services;
• Increased brand presence and customer relevance for carrier-neutral providers in the cloud era; and
• Fully prepared for anticipated demand in IoT, mobile and other edge use cases.
Anton Jacobsz, Managing Director at Networks Unlimited, an authorised distributor of HyperGrid in Africa, says that carrier neutral providers partnering with HyperGrid can immediately offer True Cloud services in their facilities continent-wide. “This simplifies not only IT but also OpEx and CapEx as it eliminates many of the overhead costs and the complexity of organisations having to build and operate the infrastructure themselves.”
“HyperGrid’s service perfectly augments existing direct connect models, allowing customers to fully transition to cloud computing, without the adoption barriers and risks inherent in traditional public cloud services,” concludes Thomason.
For more information, please contact Johann Pretorius, HyperGrid product manager at Networks Unlimited: [email protected]
