APAC Insider Issue 3 2018

26 APAC / Issue 3 2018 , Organisations are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud strategy to improve the way they run their business and deliver new services to customers. As enterprises mix public and private IT resources, the real challenge lies in the ability to automate and orchestrate workloads, according to leading data and analytics company, GlobalData. A standard enterprise will integrate more Software as a Service (SaaS) providers with public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Major telecom firms across the Asia-Pacific region have spotted this trend, and as a result are building aggregation hubs to enable their customers to connect to third-party cloud providers. These carrier-neutral interconnects, in turn, provide access to the co-location facilities supporting the necessary cross- connections between cloud providers and service providers. While customers can look forward to a range of competitive options Competitive Options for Connectivity and Services Success of hybrid cloud lies in ability to automate and orchestrate workloads, says GlobalData. for connectivity and services, the management layer is the weakest link and the most important. Dustin Kehoe, Service Director of APAC at GlobalData, comments: “It is not just about how many connected clouds a service provider wants to deliver for its customer, but also the ability to deliver one platform that can integrate compute, network and storage with next-gen security, application management (both legacy and mobile/cloud-native) and service management into a common, highly orchestrated cloud workspace.” This is where a robust management platform plays a crucial role in automating manual tasks and scripts including configuration, provisioning and management of services through a template-based approach. A robust management platform will integrate different aspects of service management such as incident response, capacity, availability and SLAs, through to change management and the activation of a service catalogue to guide user consumption. The management platform should look at cloud as one that is being closely linked to a broader ‘software-defined’ infrastructure encompassing campus, branch and data centre networks. Kehoe adds: “While IT automation sets out to deliver the common architecture for both legacy IT and net-new cloud- native applications, software- defined infrastructure will provide businesses with the ability to mix and match cloud deployment environments with requirements on performance, security and compliance. “The real opportunity is around the ability to make the configuration, management, and security of virtual environments easier. The first service provider who can offer such a solution, across a mixed estate of vendors and cloud platforms will be well on their way of solving an industry challenge. Integrating networks and clouds as one logical software-defined domain is the starting point.”