Moving beyond carrier-neutral connectivity

Organisations around the world are rethinking their IT infrastructure as they seek to leverage existing capabilities to pull ahead of rivals in today’s hypercompetitive business climate. And no wonder, as agile start-ups have shown themselves highly capable of securing funding to disrupt existing businesses, even as globalisation and digitalisation dramatically increase cost pressures on traditional verticals.

The result is a sharp rise in the popularity of the cloud, as enterprises turn to public cloud platforms to ease unrelenting pressure on budgets and inject greater flexibility and scalability into their IT deployments. And rather than be locked into a specific cloud platform, they are turning to multiple cloud providers to meet their unique and disparate requirements.

Basic considerations such as budgets and preferences aside, there is also compatibility with legacy systems to consider. Not only are these systems often mission-critical, replacing them can require significant re-engineering with associated project risks. Enterprises are cognizant of this, which is another reason why on-premises deployments are not going away anytime soon.

The numbers from cloud deployments tell the same story, with analyst firm IDC reporting that 72.3% of cloud users currently have a mix of on-premises and off-premises cloud deployments. For enterprises planning their next-gen infrastructure for the future, this means that they need to examine their cloud requirements in tandem with their on-premises requirements.

Specifically, organisations need to think deeper about how their data centres will anchor their multi-cloud strategy, and whether their existing facilities have what it takes. Where the focus had traditionally revolved around reliability and cost, advancements have since been made to support current concerns such as speed of system deployments and manageability.

Rapid deployments are achieved with the pre-laying of infrastructure to pare down the lead time for new deployments or expansions, while newer data centres offer substantial features over yesteryear’s facilities. This includes the ability to monitor usage parameters such as power usage and cooling, and a redesigned ecosystem created specifically to reduce the burdensome complexities of managing these facilities.

Elsewhere, the digitisation of both the network and core data centre components allows organisations to synergistically manage both the network and on-premises hardware and adapt them to meet current requirements. The result is an intelligent data centre that not only offers speed in deployment, but deep insights into their systems and utilisation as well.

With a suitable data centre to facilitate the management and orchestration of complex multi-cloud environments in place, the final component needed to support a modern, multi-cloud IT deployment would be the network. Reliable communication is a linchpin to modern IT infrastructure, while direct, private and low-latency routes to the cloud are crucial for supporting the complex hybrid cloud deployments that enterprises need today. Yet network design, bandwidth provisioning and managing them are not trivial considerations for most enterprises.

In addition, the intelligent data centre may encompass more than one facility due to legacy deployments, or to support the establishment of a geographically dispersed infrastructure to ensure business continuity. This makes reliable, seamless connectivity between different data centres a vital requirement.

This is where Singtel Data Centre and Cloud Connect (DC Connect) can give enterprises a significant advantage. Where a carrier-neutral data centre requires businesses to separately provision and manage connectivity links themselves, Singtel DC Connect is a turn-key service that leverages Singtel’s substantial investments in fibre optic connectivity to over 25 top data centres and partnerships with cloud providers.

Organisations can tap into the service’s advanced software-defined networking (SDN) platform to instantly access a wide breadth of rich networking capabilities provisioned through a single link. A centralised console offers direct manageability, self-provisioning of bandwidth and visibility of network traffic. The latter means that any increases in network consumption can be closely monitored, and administrators can detect and address performance degradation before users or applications feel the impact.

Ultimately, an intelligent data centre with Singtel DC Connect can serve as the foundation of a successful multi-cloud deployment, giving enterprises the full confidence to go multi-cloud. You can learn more about how it can help meet your hybrid connectivity demands here.