This post is produced in association with AT&T.
As companies innovate, CIOs are challenged to think differently about how they can transform operations. The traditional capital-intense operations of previous IT eras – which saw companies building and managing massive data centers to run mission-critical applications – is giving way to one that utilizes external providers to deliver more dynamic, flexible and cost-effective solutions to support their business.
Public cloud solutions have made significant inroads by creating economies of scale with multi-tenant platforms and delivering strong performance with easy-to-use solutions – all at affordable prices. Benefits like these are leading CIOs to seriously consider moving their business to the cloud. In fact, a report from IDC estimates that by 2017, nearly half of mainstream enterprise IT will be delivered via a cloud solution1.
While the cloud certainly presents a tremendous opportunity, enterprises have been slow to adopt cloud solutions, given critical capability gaps. The following are some of the top considerations for companies to move more enterprise workloads to the cloud:
Security. Accessing cloud services via the public Internet simply doesn’t meet the security requirements of the enterprise. Cloud solutions must meet their organization’s corporate security standards – and the easier they are to enforce, the better. Security is non-negotiable, no matter how tempted companies are by the promise of faster and more efficient public cloud solutions.
Performance. Enterprise cloud solutions must stand up to the performance and latency standards currently in place with their existing solutions. The “best effort” nature of the public Internet translates to serious concern for certain enterprise applications accessing the cloud.
Flexibility and Ease of Use. One key benefit of cloud is the ability to dynamically scale infrastructure resources to rapidly address changing business needs. Many businesses also require the ability to on-demand expand and contract network resources and prioritize workloads as they transition to the cloud.
Enterprise customers shared these insights time and time again as we developed our cloud network solution, AT&T NetBondSM. NetBond combines a customer’s existing MPLS VPN network with their cloud infrastructure platform to provide a highly secure, high-performance cloud networking solution. This solution allows customers to take advantage of the benefits of their existing private network and cloud solution while reducing exposure to security risks of the public Internet. We’ve found companies may save as much as 60 percent on networking costs due to AT&T NetBond’s ability to automatically flex with the needs of the cloud service. Additionally, customers can achieve as much as 50 percent lower latency and three times the availability of the public Internet. This value resonates with CIOs considering the cloud.
For example, a health services and information technology company that provides services to hundreds of U.S. hospitals needs a solution that can easily scale up or down to support unpredictable workload requirements. They also need the solution to be highly secure for transmitting sensitive medical records – including patient files, medical images and doctors’ notes – and they require it to expand and grow on-demand. AT&T NetBond can fulfill these needs.
Finally, moving to the cloud also opens up significant opportunities for CIOs to experiment and innovate quickly. As companies consider their long-term cloud strategies, many will deploy hybrid solutions relying on a variety of cloud providers to meet their business needs. AT&T already works with some of the world’s leading cloud service providers and plans to continue to expand its ecosystem. These choices support the hybrid model and allow customers to evolve how they use cloud services without sacrificing on security or performance.
The cloud continues to be a compelling solution for CIOs and is picking up steam in the enterprise. With the right level of due diligence and the appropriate end-to-end cloud strategy, enterprise customers can feel confident moving to the cloud.
REFERENCES
1 IDC, “Directions 13: Competing on the 3rd Platform,” by Frank Gens, Chief Analyst
Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they're always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.