Cloud Hosting

The sudden outbreak of the pandemic led to a countrywide lockdown, forcing enterprises to operate digitally or remotely, challenging the existing on-prem data centre setups. This has given rise to modern solutions, powered by the cloud and complemented by edge data centers. The growing popularity of 3rd party data centers and hybrid multi-cloud setups has given way to a new paradigm of business operations and critical asset management.

The dynamism and spontaneity of the current economic environment has spurred digital adoption among organizations. Enterprises are striving for better infrastructure management that will deliver flexibility, IT operation efficiency and cost reductions.

In this context, ETCIO.com in association with GPX, hosted a virtual roundtable to gauge the role of edge data centers in India, facilitating adoption of hybrid cloud, and the roadmap ahead. For any third-party edge data center, the value it offers is dependent upon the number of networks and cloud service providers housed in the data center. The panel discussion was graced by Vamsi Mudiam, Director for Business Development, Oracle India; Manoj Paul, Managing Director, GPX India; Yogesh Salian, Founder & Director - Client Services, Skandha Media Services; and Abhijit Mukherjee, General Manager (Business Information System), Mahanagar Gas.

Paul believes that especially since the pandemic, customers are increasingly moving away from their in-house data centres to either a third-party data centre or to the cloud. Organizations, except for the one born in the cloud are looking for hybrid proposition to sweat their assets and also leverage cloud at the same time.

On the other hand, multi-cloud adoption is also seeing expansion since flexibility and options encourage multi-cloud adoption and help reduce risk of relying on a single cloud provider for all the business data. This is where a multi-cloud strategy provides a certain level of business assurance.

The phenomenon of Cloud Exchange is growing, which offers flexibility and choice. GPX Open Cloud Exchange solution is a multi-homing solution which is fully GPX managed solution, offering connectivity to multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) hosted inside GPX Mumbai data center campus. Utilizing the GPX Open Cloud Exchange Solution, enterprises can seamlessly connect to multiple Cloud providers using a simple cross-connect, accelerating their Cloud adoption and enabling them to optimize hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud network strategies.

The benefits of hosting DR on cloudEstablishing a robust disaster recovery (DR) plan is critical for every organisation to ensure business continuity and the pandemic proves its necessity further. However, deploying a disaster recovery plan is expensive and is typically done by large enterprises. The availability of DR on cloud and DR as a service (DRaaS) promises better cost savings, efficiency and maintenance.

Mudiam explained, DR is something which is usually on stand-by it is not needed to be used, powered or managed all the time. In fact, utilization is often less than 10% in a year. However, it should be capable of being quickly engaged when an incident eventually happens. So, there is no need to keep an in-house DR running always. Companies like Oracle gives per-second billing opportunity with DR on cloud.

Moving such functionality to a third-party cloud server has huge advantages, since you pay only for what you use. With cloud servers or third party data centers, one does not need to worry about engineers in their own center (DC) to get the job done. Cloud or third-party DCs are already manned 24x7, and hence, is easy to provision when required. Diligent and informed DR planning and investment goes a long way in reinforcing business continuity.

Stepping into a hybrid cloud futureA cloud strategy is the first step towards building digitally transformed enterprise. While many have placed hybrid and multi-cloud adoption plans in their priority lists, many are yet to even start its implementation and migration. However, its not an easy task to migrate extensive legacy data and systems, powered by in-house data centres. Thus, organizations must chalk a well-thought hybrid cloud strategy, balanced by edge data centres and efficient cloud platforms, for all kind of business operations like data storage and management, application usage, access control, and DR. As we gradually steer toward a post-Covid world which demands higher efficiency, cost optimization and business continuity assurance, architecting an able cloud and edge data center roadmap would be the key to success for enterprises.

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The Enterprise of Tomorrow, Built on the Cloud and Edge - ETCIO.com