Archived CEO Blogs

Hybrid clouds are turning out to be the best way for enterprises to enable employees’ continued access to powerful on-demand public cloud resources without losing control over corporate data, corporate security, the ability to comply with legal requirements (e.g., ensuring employee and customer privacy), or the maintenance of legacy capabilities.

Public cloud + private cloud = necessity
After all, you’re not going to get line-of-business employees trying to do their jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible to cease their Shadow IT habits. They’ll invariably sign up for one of those quite excellent public cloud application services — whether you like it or not. Whether you even know it or not.

And odds are you can’t afford to devote your IT people’s limited time to building in-house replacements for such services. This makes a hybrid cloud architecture a necessity for most enterprises, since a hybrid cloud combines use of

Given how much cloud apps can boost your business agility while reducing maintenance, labor, and capital costs, chances are you’re spending a sizeable chunk of your IT budget on them (probably more than you realize).

You’re not alone. Industry watcher IDC predicts that in just a couple of years, at least half of all IT spending will be cloud-based, and by 2020, 60%-70% of all IT infrastructure, software, services, and technology spending will be cloud-based.

By any measure, a smoothly operating data network is a business essential; the typical unplanned network outage, which lasts an average of 95 minutes, now costs upwards of $740,000 — and more than 80% of that cost is due to business disruption, forsaken revenue, and loss of end-user productivity.

Yet every enterprise’s data network is different. So what does it take to get your unique network services requirements right?

If you’ve been stalling about data network upgrades while also planning to expand your use of cloud services, mobile capabilities (especially corporate wifi), voice-over-IP (now present in two thirds of enterprises, according to one study ), and video streaming, you might want to rethink the order in which you proceed .

That’s because these sorts of capabilities require network services that just weren’t needed before. Without the right networking capabilities, your cloud, wifi, and VoIP efforts may well stall.

In my last post, I wrote about the crucial role network services play in underpinning cloud and managed services — and notably in enabling your technology services provider to wield a mix of customizable services they can tailor specifically to your business’s needs.

As you migrate more and more of your data to cloud environments, you’ve probably noticed a couple of things:

1 Data gravity
It’s not your imagination: as you’ve embraced cloud computing, the data still outside your cloud(s) really does get pulled toward applications running in your cloud(s).