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CLOUD COMPUTING
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Driving efficiency
Simon Bearne, Commercial
Director, NGD
www.ngd.co.uk
The data centres behind the
complex and demanding cloud
structures of tomorrow
Cloud services can be expected to deliver on the IT
requirements of thousands, even tens of thousands of
organisations. Raising the stakes even further, users
increasingly demand hybrid solutions that give them the best
of all worlds by being able to seamlessly interconnect private
and public clouds together.
Many user organisations also have a practical need to
encompass legacy IT workloads that can operate alongside
the hybrid cloud environment. Furthermore, there’s a growing
trend towards multi-tenanted private clouds being offered by
some service providers. These developments are placing even
more onus on the resilience and efficiency of the data centres
behind such complex and demanding cloud structures.
Some of the major public cloud providers are taking steps
to make the development and deployment of hybrid solutions
more straightforward. The newly launched Microsoft Azure
Stack, for example, is intended to allow organisations to
run Microsoft Azure IaaS and PaaS services directly within
their own data centres, whether in-house or in their chosen
colocation facility.
On paper, this allows them to enjoy the full range of public
Microsoft Azure services on their own hardware, while also
moving private workloads seamlessly between their chosen
data centre and the Azure public cloud. The major advantages
here are continued ownership of core and mission-critical
applications in a private cloud, while also receiving the added
benefits of continuous software updating and automated
backups delivered with Azure public cloud service.
Such initiatives are clearly essential for getting hybrid
clouds well and truly off the ground. There are many
organisations out there, especially more heavily regulated
ones, demanding the retention of private cloud infrastructures
and certain legacy systems which cannot be moved into a
cloud-based infrastructure. An organisation might be happy
enough using an Internet-based public cloud development
platform for testing new applications, but not once it goes
into production due to security, latency and privacy issues.
In practice, whether in-house, collocated or both, the
need for modern data centre infrastructures is inescapable;
infrastructures capable of supporting the exponential
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