Hybrid Cloud Congress Highlights – Part 1

I was fortunate to attend an all-day event sponsored by Equinix and Dell on the state of Hybrid Cloud: The Hybrid Cloud Congress, on January 18, 2022. 

Background on Equinix

To set the stage for those unfamiliar with Equinix, the company has established its current dominant position in the Datacenter/Colocation market through the realisation that the competing technology vendors sought a space – a demilitarized zone (DMZ) if you will – where they can play nice and test interoperability of their products with their competitors. Equinix started out providing this type of DMZ Colocation capability back in 1998. Fast-forward to 2022 and Equinix is now a 70+ Billion-dollar valued company with 220+ Datacenter locations worldwide. It provides an unmatched low latency fabric to its customers as well as extending the same to the likes of AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Oracle and IBM.

The Hybrid Cloud Congress

The conference began with an insightful dialog between Leanne Starace, an SVP Solutions Architecture at , Equinix and Mark Andersen, Senior Director EMEA, Global Solution Architect at Equinix. Mark has classified customers into four segments based on the reasons why they gravitate towards Hybrid Cloud.  

The Four Customer Segments

Segment 1: Customers who lack in-house capabilities for cloud services. They have significant investments in legacy systems of record in-house, on-premises, which they are trying to integrate with the newer engagement systems in the cloud. They want to integrate business processes with SaaS subscriptions. 

Segment 2: Customers who are trying to combine services from multiple cloud providers. They find something they really like in one and something else in another. They want to combine and integrate them better. He convincingly argues that no one hyperscale platform has the best of breed solutions for everything across the board. 

Segment 3: Customers who either started out in cloud or hastily adopted cloud services and solutions. They are now more mature and want to take advantage of the newly available options in the Colocation/Private Datacenters. Think here of new financial OpEx options from the likes of Dell Apex and HPE Greenlake or performance considerations. The list includes other increasingly relevant areas such as regulatory and compliance factors and platform features. 

Segment 4: Customers with demanding requirements around artificial intelligence, machine learning and mobility. The demands in these areas are driving the need for distributed computing which in turn requires the collection and distribution of data away from the core, specifically at the edge. 

Core Values of Hybrid Cloud

Leanne Starace succinctly sums up the core values a hybrid cloud offers, namely: neutrality and optionality. She stressed the superior features of a successful hybrid network: low-latency fabric/network acting as the “glue-in-between” the elements in assorted services and locations. 

Mark does an excellent job summarizing what makes the landscape for hybrid environments so diverse: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), IaaS with SaaS, private cloud, private cloud on-prem, private cloud off-prem in a colocation facility, off-prem in a colocation facility at an edge, on-prem in close proximity to a (public) cloud provider. Maybe it needs to be run by an MSP (Managed Service Provider) or private cloud on a public cloud provider. 

He makes a case that the more the management can be homogenized, the more it can be offloaded/allocated/deallocated – giving customers back control of their digital estate. This approach addresses the risks that the public cloud presents in aspects of data sovereignty, security, and costs.

Vendor-neutral ecosystems like Equinix allow for: 

• The ability for customers to integrate public, private, and multi-partner solutions to optimize their digital solutions 
• Enabling accelerating ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) through hybrid cloud 
• Leveraging the efficiencies that are possible due to hybrid cloud 

Mark admits that proper design of hybrid cloud “takes a village” and often involves partners and MSPs. PTS has been very interested in both the technical solutions and the business model that Equinix provides. Vendor neutrality, cloud adjacency, and balancing the right mix of public cloud/colo resource deployment is becoming critical for a solid hybrid cloud strategy.  

Please continue to follow our series of thoughts on Equinix’s Hybrid Cloud Congress event.