Why Hybrid IT? An Overview of Hybrid, the DataBank Way

The ever-evolving nature of IT workloads and technologies now ensures that there is no “one-size-fits-all” strategy for IT infrastructure. Running a corporate data center isn’t the best long-term strategy for most organizations, requiring tremendous capex and adding significant management and staffing complexity.  Similarly, public cloud platforms haven’t proven to be the solution for every application either, especially where needs are highest for performance, compliance and control.

Enterprises still have many IT workloads located on premises, and some analysts have reported as many as 80 percent of companies have repatriated applications or data, back to collocated data centers and private clouds due to security, performance, cost or control. (Source: Hosting Journalist)

A hybrid approach provides the best option for meeting the complex and ever-changing demands of today’s IT environment.

IT leaders need to take into account several factors when designing a hybrid infrastructure strategy including application performance, internal skill sets, costs. To get started, it helps to consider three of the most common drivers of adopting a Hybrid strategy. Colocation, Capex and Support.

Top Drivers for Hybrid IT

1. Colocation

Colocation is one option that removes the first layer of responsibility from your IT team, including core infrastructure, network, power, and cooling. Moving an environment from an on-premise data center into a data center facility improves financial dynamics. Unless you’re running a data center of mass scale, colocation is a very efficient mechanism for maintaining similar profitability metrics for the organization. It also delivers scale and resilience that most enterprises don’t have the wherewithal to generate on their own.

2. Capex

It’s worth taking a look at workloads you don’t want to operate hardware infrastructure for. Working with a data center provider for a more hybrid approach will give you the opportunity to leverage internet, security, storage-on-demand, and backup services, taking day-to-day management off your IT team’s plate so they can focus on core initiatives.

3. Tech Support

Transferring ownership of workloads, apps, and operating systems to a data center partner are another hybrid use case. A proven partner will be able to provide the infrastructure your applications rely on. This eliminates the need to worry about patching or monitoring.

Removing support and operational burdens lessens the pressures of everyday tasks and reallocates energy into building the innovative systems, applications, and solutions of tomorrow.

Further, it’s significantly easier to manage many servers at scale. Data center partners traditionally use an operations platform that runs on a more prescriptive methodology for service management. This can be applied to 1,000s of nodes, rather than relying on sys admins to do the work.

What Does Hybrid, the DataBank Way, Look Like?

As organizations have realized the value of a hybrid approach, DataBank’s collection of capabilities and environments have become one of the most convenient pathways to deploying a hybrid strategy.

Not every application will perform best in the public cloud, so DataBank provides a range of platforms to enable your Hybrid IT strategy including colocation, private cloud and public cloud on-ramps.  And across those environments, we enable public connectivity to spin up or spin down workloads, yet maintain visibility within one pane of glass for simplified management and global visibility at every level.

In addition, our customers have convenient direct access to three critical components of a Hybrid IT infrastructure:

• Secure access to public cloud
• Managed security
• Storage

Each of these services are consumable via cross connect in your colocation cage. You simply plug right in one or two connections, and these products are available to your infrastructure that lives in your data center. Plus, within each data center, every customer has access to FedRAMP compliant IaaS, PaaS, or colocation, all on a single platform, ensuring long-term performance and viability of your IT strategy as business needs evolve. It’s our goal to be there for every step of your Hybrid IT journey, with as much or as little as needed for your unique requirements.

DataBank delivers all the building blocks of a hybrid strategy allowing you achieve cost efficiency, flexibility, scalability, and agility simultaneously.  And we make embracing a Hybrid IT strategy easy and pragmatic ­– every customer interfaces with seasoned engineers—never inexperienced analysts. If you’re looking for a partner to work with you throughout the evolution of your hybrid IT strategy, look no further. Connect with DataBank today, or call us at 1.800.840.7533 and speak to a specialist.