Cloud is here, and it is not leaving anytime soon. With more and more adoption by government, educational districts and institutions, as well as commercial enterprises, cloud adoption and how to truly benefit from it is top of mind for many.
And, with this increase in adoption comes the need to truly understand how the varying levels of cloud function and what the benefits truly are for large enterprises as well as government and public agencies.
Congruently, hybrid cloud options have also gained clout and are becoming more widely used to mitigate costs and improve efficiency. In March of last year, Cisco, partnered with Telstra, rolled out “the world’s first truly open, hybrid cloud”: Cisco’s Intercloud.
But, what is this Intercloud? How does it work? How will it benefit your enterprise?
First, let me attempt to put some high-level clarity around the Intercloud. In order to understand Cisco’s Intercloud strategy, it is best to take a brief look backward at the history of IT evolution. In the 90’s, every company seemed to be building isolated networks. There was Token Ring, Novell, AppleTalk, DecNet and so on. But, you couldn’t move data between the networks; they weren’t connected. Then, along came Cisco to unify those networks.
The world of cloud today is a world of isolated clouds. There’s little workload or data portability. Cisco’s vision is to do the same thing it had success in doing many years ago, but now the strategy is to connect all of these clouds into the Intercloud — whether private, public or hybrid through technology and innovation. No one cloud model or single cloud approach, such as the massively scalable clouds from Amazon, Google or Microsoft will win alone in this space.
Hybrid cloud environments, with a combination of private and public cloud capabilities, can adapt to businesses’ needs. With Cisco’s Intercloud, specifically, the data center or private cloud can be expanded to include the public cloud, allowing companies the ability to increase capacity without distinction between their internal cloud to the external one, making integration and maneuvering from one to the other appear seamless.
Cisco and its Intercloud ecosystem partners are focused on building upon this cloud strategy, in terms of scale, breadth of reach, depth of integration between clouds, and richness of cloud services. They are delivering the products, solutions, and services to offer customers choice for placing Intercloud workloads.
For Enterprise Private Clouds, Cisco will use its platform to deliver the enterprise workloads it needs. With Cisco’s partners, they can support the customers that need dev/ops models, want to create truly native applications for the public cloud, or want to harness the value of Hadoop, big data analytics, Hana, or Cisco’s collaboration platform.
The Intercloud is not just a collection of clouds, but more importantly, an interconnection of clouds. Together, Cisco and its partners, using capabilities in a way that no one else can, will enable the open and secure migration of workloads between private and public clouds…regardless of infrastructure, regardless of hypervisor. The Intercloud fabric family of software products gives customers the ability to choose the right cloud for the right workload, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Azure, or Amazon or Google.
But, how will enterprises benefit from Hybrid Clouds, such as Intercloud?
Flexibility and Adaptability:
One of the most cost effective benefits of a hybrid cloud is the ability to add more capacity on demand.
An adaptable data center bolstered with cloud allows enterprises the flexibility to store more as needed, as opposed to dictating that the data center has to be built to peak capacity at the onset. Building to peak capacity can be costly and, in some cases, unnecessary as the amount of capacity needed may fluctuate from time to time. These fluctuations highlight the need for a flexible, yet adaptable system.
Consistency:
Along with flexibility and adaptability also comes consistency. With the capability and freedom to control the capacity on demand, enterprises will find that their data centers are behaving and functioning more consistently.
Elasticity and Agility:
Because companies need to mitigate costs, the elasticity that comes from “pay as you grow” expansion with the public cloud can enable companies to avoid the initial capital needed to build an infrastructure based on what they might need. Additionally, with tech components evolving at an impressive rate, the agility that comes from utilizing Cisco’s Intercloud is notable – the overall adaptable nature of the Intercloud enables agility and readiness.
Cloud, in its various forms, is revolutionizing the data center and how it functions. To learn more about how cloud can revolutionize how your enterprise’s data center functions, click here.
