Node4 has announced the expansion of its country-wide Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud solution. Launched in February 2022, the service was initially accessed via the company’s Northampton data centre (serving the UK central region), but increased demand from northern businesses prompted Node4 to upgrade its Leeds data centre (serving the UK north region) and deliver the service in closer proximity to customers. The upgrade will also provide additional UK-wide capacity and regional diversity to Node4’s infrastructure.
The origins of this increased customer demand are highlighted in Node4’s Future of Hybrid Cloud report. Carried out among businesses using AWS, Azure and GCP, the survey found that over 50% of companies would adopt hybrid cloud to support applications that didn’t traditionally suit public cloud infrastructure — often due to precise performance or data sovereignty needs. However, more than a third of respondents across the region were deterred from doing so by the complexity of integrating multiple platforms themselves.
These findings underscore the complexity, compliance, latency and legacy technology challenges businesses face when migrating to a hybrid IT environment. They also demonstrate the need for an offering that can simplify hybrid cloud adoption, such as Node4’s Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud solution.
