By Adam Garder, Head of Products
Cloud migration works best when supported by an interconnection strategy. As virtual services continue to consolidate their role at the heart of digital strategy, it’s important to fully appreciate the critical role interconnectivity plays in achieving the ultimate goal of being a more flexible, agile and productive elastic cloud enterprise.
Many organisations are knee-deep in executing their cloud migration plans to advance their stake in the digital transformation game. As this journey continues and automated, data-driven processes drive their way deeper into every area of operations, efficiently connecting all of the people, locations, clouds, and systems becomes the new battleground objective.
Interconnection Strategy Underpins Succcessful Cloud Migration
Inevitably, the efficiency, security, and performance your interconnection strategy underpins the success of your cloud migration strategy and forms the critical lever businesses need to pull to stay ahead of market changes.
There are four key bridgeheads established when you integrate a strong interconnectivity strategy to your evolving digital infrastructure model:
- Proximity to the cloud – Achieving growth and meeting organisational objectives can be hindered by a lack of reliable connectivity. Embedding your digital infrastructure within an ecosystem including all of the clouds, carriers and IT services providers at the core of your strategy enables private direct connections that are affordable and easy to provision
- Secure, scalable connections – Hybrid IT models connected via the public internet inherently leaves your business vulnerable. Directly connecting to your clouds not only improves security, but also enables you to scale rapidly, move quickly, and self-serve your needs as and when they change.
- Customised solutions – Every organisation is unique and needs a customised cloud migration strategy. Elevating connectivity to high priority status allows you to shape Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud solutions specifically suited to the risk profile, budgets and data volumes under management for your organisation.
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High-performance networks – Being able to access high-bandwidth, low-latency connections with the resilience and agility your organisation requires puts you on the high ground for managing ever-increasing volumes of data as well as creating outstanding user and customer experiences.
Cloud Migration Strategy: Creating options and reducing complexity
Increasingly, with the help of carriers and services providers, direct cloud-to-cloud connectivity wholly within an ecosystem, is viable and enables wider choice and new capabilities to make choices on which services are best suited which workloads and functions.
By operating from within an ecosystem, you also create opportunities to reduce the number and complexity of services you utilise which adds significant value to cloud migration strategy by consolidating provision and having better visibility to architecture and usage.
Of course, effective interconnectivity does have to be resilient, private and fully redundant to provide the high availability demanded today but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated.
Virtual private connectivity facilitates an easy proactive, agile capability to turn services on and off as required and only pay for what you use on specific data transportation and internet connection. Having a single portal giving visibility all of your connectivity services allows you to observe exactly what you have, what is in high demand and where you can improve.
Each new direct connection to a cloud platform comes with its own time-metered cost, plus additional fees based on traffic volumes. Exact costs vary from platform to platform, but that revenue model is largely standardised across the Hyperscale cloud providers.
Traditionally, to physically connect you could commission a dedicated point-to-point link from your physical infrastructure to the cloud infrastructure platform selected. Indeed, sometimes this is exactly the approach you should take.
But the advent of virtual, elastic connectivity solutions, such as NEXTDC’s AXON platform, changes the game. Contemporary interconnection strategy is more about introducing similar flexibility and utility service style model that is available for cloud instances. Customers are utilising dynamic connectivity that can be self-provisioned in real-time.
Under this model, you’re given complete control of creating, scaling, and decommissioning connectivity services irrespective of whether they are cross-connects between partners, customers or disparate PoPs or if they are cloud-to-cloud migrations or new workloads uploaded to virtual machines.
With a port onto a virtual connectivity platform, customers can open a connectivity service, utilise it to traffic data from any Point A to any Point B over private, secure and dedicated links that can be closed down again when a payload is complete. Best of all, you only pay for what you use based on time and bandwidth
As they juggle their Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud environments, our customers are continuing to discover new ways to leverage this type of interconnectivity strategy.
Accelerate your competitive advantage
Chemist Warehouse have grown exponentially over the last couple of years, becoming a retail powerhouse. But their success didn’t happen overnight. They understood early on the important role their digital infrastructure played in their ability to drive and sustain growth, more specifically, their Multi-Cloud strategy.
Cloud has played a critical role as they continue to transform their business. Ensuring they achieve their best-fit objectives relies on their interconnection strategy. There are instances where they need to shift whole applications (and the accompanying data reserves) from one public cloud platform to another based on newly identified best-fit analysis.
Given the broad reach AXON facilitates, what could be a mammoth task, is achieved with ease. Virtual connections are provisioned in minutes and data transfer starts instantaneously. Once the migration concludes, the virtual connection is shut down. Empowered to accelerate your IT transformation.
Reach out if we can support your mission to optimise interconnectivity strategy in ways that will help advance your competitive advantage and cost efficiency.
