“At the same time, we offer a gateway to those same public cloud services but in a much more secure way. All of the cloud providers offer that business to business type service. So a big question is where is the company starting from and where are they going? What do they need?”
While offering such services, companies like Equinix recognise that some companies want to keep some facility on site.
More and more providers are linking up their data centres with high connectivity switching networks to allow customers to come into the data centre, take the space they need for their own in-house infrastructure but also have access to the upstream links they need to take advantage of the cloud providers’ infrastructure — that could be AWS, Microsoft Azure or Salesforce, Gary Keogh, Digital Realty
“They perhaps have a main corporate headquarters or campus and want something geographically located locally, but they will then also use us to do more processing or storage and also access various public clouds depending on their needs,” said Murphy.
“On top of that we’re also seeing companies use more than one cloud provider. They’ll use Amazon for maybe some processing and Azure for some storage and IBM software for something else. They’re getting savvy to the option that they don’t have to have all their eggs in one basket.”
For some companies, the issue of whether to build out an on-site data centre or just make use of cloud facilities is largely a function of how they do business.
Business function
“This is particularly true for companies that rely upon 2.0-generation apps. We’re certainly seeing a lot more customers now looking at the hybrid model. Companies that use Salesforce are a prime example,” said Richard O’Brien, IT director with Triangle.
“They’ll have Salesforce in the cloud and traditionally they would have had SAP within the data centre, and then they would have had a messaging tool of some description — a broker between those two for exchanging data and updates and stuff like that. That model is still very much there.”
According to O’Brien, his company has started to see a lot more businesses look to embrace a hybrid model. The reason is that the capabilities of cloud providers to take traditional SAP-type legacy systems and move them online is increasing. This is diminishing the need for an on-site data centre. However, he does not think that on-site operations are quite dead yet.
Some people think a data centre means a physical building, others think it’s their data cluster, some think it’s the VLANs that they have left, right and centre. I think, ultimately, it’s about where data rests. And that’s the discussion; where does your data rest? Garry Connolly, Host in Ireland
“From a file services perspective, from a mail perspective, from a SharePoint perspective and from an Active Directory perspective, we’re seeing portions move into the cloud but still there is a sense that there are certain applications that will be around for a long time that just don’t lend themselves to migrating,” he said.
“In many cases, we’re talking about organisations that have been around a long time and have legacy applications where it is difficult to move them into the cloud without basically throwing them out and starting again.”
The answer for many is to engage with outsourcing the needs they can, and keeping those they can’t running separately on-site. Whether it is running applications on-site or in the cloud, both approaches have their value.
“There’s a lot of cost typically associated with building out the ability to react to a dynamic business environment, but if you are operating a managed service agreement, you mightn’t be as flexible as you would be if you have your technology on site. Whereas in the cloud, obviously, you’re a lot more flexible in other ways because you pay as you consume,” said O’Brien.
According to Gary Keogh, sales director with Digital Realty, as more and more companies adopt the hybrid model of IT infrastructure, they just do not need dedicated data centres in the way that they once did.
Reduced need
“They don’t even need as much infrastructure as before and they don’t need it located in a building dedicated to them. It’s driven by requirements, what applications they use and how much they can outsource to cloud providers, and how much they need to insource for their own needs to run independently,” he said.
“Because of this, what’s happening in the market is that more and more providers are linking up their data centres with high connectivity switching networks to allow customers to come into the data centre, take the space they need for their own in-house infrastructure but also have access to the upstream links they need to take advantage of the cloud providers’ infrastructure — that could be AWS, Microsoft Azure or Salesforce.”
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