The Right Cloud Strategy Starts with the Right Data Center Strategy

JP Laqueur, Senior Vice President of Marketing at DataBank, explores the close ties between cloud strategy and success and data center strategy and approaches.

Cloud technologies have enabled enterprises to lower operational and capital expenditures, accelerate the development and release of new products and services, and dynamically adjust their IT infrastructure to meet changing market demand. As a result, cloud technologies continue to gain traction and according to IDC, by the end of 2020, 67% of enterprise infrastructure will be based in the cloud.

But not all cloud service providers or platforms are created equally, nor are they always appropriate for certain business sectors or strategic objectives. Some organizations, especially those with strict performance or complex compliance requirements, have re-patriated applications back to premise-based infrastructures after finding cloud platforms were more expensive to operate, or presented additional management and security challenges. In fact, according to IDC in its Q119 CloudPulse report, as many as 85% of customers had initiated some kind of cloud repatriation effort.

And while some clouds have remained “general purpose,” newer “enterprise clouds” have emerged to address the needs of organizations that have greater fault tolerance, security, and compliance requirements.

But the evaluation of which infrastructure is best for an application can no longer simply be a debate about cloud vs. on-premises, or about which type of cloud. It needs to include the consideration of a modern, data center operator. In fact, we believe a third-party data center should be at the heart of every cloud or hybrid infrastructure decision and it’s the topic of our latest White Paper: “A Better Way To Cloud.”

Why? The modern data center – with its ability to aggregate colocation, cloud, and managed services – is rapidly becoming the core of a hybrid strategy, providing a critical third leg in the infrastructure stool, providing greater security and data privacy than many clouds, and hands-on management and compliance expertise beyond the reach of an in-house team.

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