Picking the Right Partners - Equinix€¦ · The Economic Benefits of Interconnection Forrester Research performed a Total Economic Impact- assessment of companies inter connecting

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Picking the Right Partners for Success in the Cloud Era

http://www.citoresearch.com/

http://www.equinix.com/

Introduction 1

A Shift in How CIOs Run Their Businesses 3

The Multi-Tenant Data Center: The Interconnection Point 4

The Challenge of Execution: The Cloud Migration 5

Choosing the Right Approach 5

In-house Do-it-Yourself 6

One-Stop Service Providers 6

Specialized Service Providers 6

The Right Way to Execute in the Cloud and Succeed 6

Equinix, Equinix Professional Services for Cloud and Unitas Global Work Together 8

How It Works 9

Assessment 9

Migration 10

Manage, Monitor and Optimize 10

Conclusion 12

CONTENTS


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IntroductionThere is no other time in history where businesses have been so dependent upon the man-agement and distribution of data among workers, customers and suppliers. The enterprise data center has evolved from a cost center to a revenue center and is considered a top strategic asset. Over the last decade, IT managers have adopted strategies to virtualize and decentralize their data centers to reduce costs and improve performance. The debate about cloud effectiveness is over.

Most CIOs have already implemented some variation of a cloud strategy, whether it’s private cloud, public cloud, multi-cloud or hybrid cloud. In this paper, we examine the underlying trends driving this migration and discuss how service providers can play a key role in transi-tioning to the modern data center. Here are four trends that are impacting every IT manager today. How they solve for these trends is unique as the companies themselves.

End users (customers, workers, suppliers and partners) are becoming increasingly mo-bile, and are demanding the same quality of experience (QoE) from their mobile applica-tions that they do from their desktops.

The Internet of Things (IoT), data collection, Big Data analytics and data-intensive appli-cations are stretching enterprise resources to their limits. While some companies have enabled IoT technology, we are only seeing the tip of what is projected to be a massive IT undertaking that will impact every aspect of a data center from network to compute and storage to Big Data and applications.

Impact on IT from mergers and acquisitions. The segregation and aggregation of cor-porate intellectual property during business entity changes is becoming more complex while there is growing pressure to complete the transition as quickly as possible.

The CIO’s relentless pursuit to improve productivity with greater focus on applications and user experience instead of underlying infrastructure.

These trends are driving companies to rethink their IT models and adopt some form of a cloud strategy to improve performance, manage data sovereignty, provide resource scalability and elasticity and improve capital utilization efficiency. The traditional centralized on-premises data center model is becoming increasingly inadequate to meet the requirements of the mod-ern enterprise. The fundamental challenge is that mobile applications rely on large amounts of data that is located long distances from the user.

This results in high data costs, at-rest and in-transit security risks, and impact on quality of user experience (QoE) as a function of network latency and reliability when data is moved over the public Internet.

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Now consider the implications of the rapidly growing demand for connecting objects, known as the Internet of Things, and where these objects will create, collect and exchange data across network infrastructure. One solution is to decentralize IT infrastructure around a user-centric architecture in which applications and data pools are located near the end us-ers and devices that consume and create the data. In this paper, we explore the benefits and challenges of using a distributed IT infrastructure model that leverages clouds and describe how to make the transition from a centralized to a distributed IT model.

This CITO Research whitepaper examines:

The trends that are driving enterprise IT to adopt new cloud architectures

How CIOs are implementing those architectures

How the data center has become integral to enterprise success in the cloud era

The best approaches to cloud implementations

How Unitas Global and Equinix, working with Equinix Professional Services for Cloud (EPS Cloud), work together to integrate and deliver key elements for a successful migration, from strategy planning and roadmap to outsourcing IT-as-a-service (ITaaS).

The Economic Benefits of InterconnectionForrester Research performed a Total Economic Impact assessment of companies inter-connecting to Equinix in the cloud. As the report points out, “The key to achieving high performance and consistent user experience is to create a network focused on users.”

To create its assessment, Forrester used case studies from four Equinix Fortune 500 cus-tomers, three of which are global companies. Each of the companies had struggled with application performance issues prior to interconnecting with Equinix. Moving to Equinix reduced application latency by 42%. Reliability increased as well, with 15% fewer network incidents and outages.

The organizations also experienced economic benefits. They achieved an ROI of 300% and a net present value of $17.3 million, with a payoff time of 4.2 months. Further, they reduced their bandwidth costs by 40%.

Other benefits included creating incremental revenue streams, substantial developer and end user time savings, cost savings and cost avoidance by obviating the need to upgrade on-premises datacenters and cloud deployment savings. The organizations also cited the Equinix partner ecosystem as a source of strong present and expected future business value.

http://www.equinix.com/resources/analyst-reports/interconnection-total-economic-impact-study/


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A Shift in How CIOs Run Their BusinessesData is the lifeblood of every company and a guarded strategic asset. This data is about to become even more valued as Big Data analytics help the enterprise maximize revenue, enhance customer satisfaction and improve resource productivity. In response to this trans-formation, CIOs are rushing to embrace new IT strategies that integrate the advantages of private and public clouds while pushing more of their infrastructure out to the network edge. Moving to a hybrid cloud model is one of the most compelling strategies toward a true ITaaS approach. In fact, the 2015 RightScale State of the Cloud Report shows that 82% of enter-prises have already deployed some form of hybrid cloud strategy.

Why is a hybrid cloud model so compelling? The hybrid cloud com-bines the benefits of on-premises data centers (and private clouds) with one or more public clouds that offer virtually unlimited on-demand compute and storage capacity. On-premises data centers and private clouds provide an advantage where certain workloads and data are better managed in-house because of security or com-pliance requirements or when refactoring legacy applications for a cloud environment is unfeasible.

Alternatively, public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mi-crosoft Azure, Google Cloud Compute and Oracle Cloud are a cost effective resource for transient peak workloads and certain business applications like disaster recovery. The al-ternative—adding capacity and operating support for disaster recovery redundancy and recoverability—would consume a majority of the IT budget. Conceptually, the hybrid model provides all the advantages with negligible downsides. The challenge, as we discuss later, is to develop a comprehensive strategy and roadmap that can be implemented quickly and with minimal disruption to the business. The benefits of this approach enable CIOs to:

Implement a user-centric, distributed architecture that pushes applications and data to where they are used.

Successfully deliver mobile applications and secure access to vast data pools anywhere, anytime and on any device.

Seamlessly migrate to secure and scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms.

At the core of a modern IT architecture are multi-tenant data centers (MTDC) offering cost-effective alternatives to enterprise-owned facilities. By design, these facilities allocate their CapEx and OpEx costs to their tenants based on space and power needs.

82% of enterprises have already deployed some

form of hybrid cloud strategy

http://www.rightscale.com/lp/2015-state-of-the-cloud-report?campaign=701700000012UP6


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The Multi-Tenant Data Center: The Interconnection PointExtending an enterprise network into an MTDC allows the company to locate IT resources (such as compute and storage) close to workers, customers, suppliers and partners. This strategy dramatically improves network utilization and application performance while driv-ing down network costs.

When selecting MTDCs, look beyond the cost of space, power, and cooling. For example, Equinix, a global MTDC provider, urges companies to consider other factors that can have an impact on the enterprise’s operation, including uptime reliability, 5-levels of access security to customer’s equipment and 24/7 availability of remote support technical services.

Equinix reports 99.9999% uptime reliability across its network of 145+ data centers world-wide, which is better than most enterprises achieve in their own data centers. However, Equinix claims the true value of its IBX® (International Business Exchange™) data centers is the more than 6,300 companies interconnected inside these facilities, which include leading companies in financial services, digital media and content, e-commerce, gaming, online so-cial networking services, government agencies, healthcare and manufacturing. Key benefits of Equinix MTDCs include:

Carrier-neutral: MTDC providers may offer a wide choice of network carriers, enabling enterprises to select the best provider for their needs at a competitive price.

A thriving ecosystem: Inside advanced MTDCs, enterprises can easily connect to cloud and application service providers and trading partners through direct fiber connection or through a virtual switch exchange. This eliminates the need for moving data over the public Internet.

Choice of public clouds: Many sophisticated data center providers feature direct and secure access points to public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mi-crosoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and others.

Single port connections: Providers such as Equinix offer their own virtual switch called the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ (ECX) where access to one or more public clouds is pro-vided via a single port. This gives companies the ability to quickly access and control their connections to multiple public cloud providers using an API or web-based application. This capability reduces the complexity of switching or adding cloud providers.


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Interconnection: An effective enterprise cloud strategy in an interconnection-oriented architecture provides on-demand resources wherever employees, customers and part-ners are located. Leveraging MTDC providers offers access to cloud providers as well as advantages over centralized architectures including:

Trading partners can connect via faster Ethernet, with speeds up to 10 Gbps.

The user application experience is greatly enhanced thanks to sub 4ms network per-formance inside the data center and under 10ms to most populations worldwide.

Direct connections between partners eliminate network hairpinning and moving data over the public Internet.

Yet with all the benefits of a distributed architecture that leverages the interconnection value of MTDCs, executing this strategy can be beyond the capabilities of in-house resources. In addition to re-engineering the infrastructure, many IT managers are reassessing how to optimize operations by outsourcing to IT service providers.

The Challenge of Execution: The Cloud Migration Although most IT managers have embraced a hybrid cloud model, the task of executing the plan can be a barrier. Most global enterprises include new and legacy systems, networks and support for hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. Then there is the challenge of meeting compliance, security, privacy and data sovereignty requirements.

Today the market for IT services providers is fragmented. Finding the right provider with deep expertise in private and hybrid cloud solutions leaves organizations with the time consuming process of researching, designing, and managing an infrastructure solution on their own. Let’s consider three approaches to cloud management.

Choosing the Right ApproachThere are three basic ways to approach a cloud migration strategy that weighs complexity, availability of in-house resources and ex-pertise, cost and schedule. They range from the traditional 100% owned and operated data center to completely outsourcing infra-structure and operations to service providers. With the increasing number of highly specialized IT professional and managed services, many CIOs are making business decisions based on service level agree-ments (SLAs) instead of CapEx and OpEx budgets. Cisco reports that a typical enterprise spends about 70% of its entire budget on operations and only 30% on differentiating its business.

A typical

enterprise spends about 70% of its entire budget on operations

and only 30% on differentiating its

business

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/cloud-computing/white_paper_c11-543729.html


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Further, Cisco estimates that 60-80% of an IT budget is used to replace aging infrastructure and enable disaster recovery and redundancy. Let’s look at three scenarios for data center management.

In-house Do-it-YourselfSome organizations choose to develop and operate their own hybrid cloud infrastructure themselves. While in-house resources are skilled at maintaining a data center, they may not have the expertise to undertake the challenges of a complex cloud and distributed net-worked data migration. Unless there is a deep bench of available resources, with the right skills and experience in moving workloads, the project is at risk and there is a possibility of a significant impact on day-to-day business operations.

One-Stop Service ProvidersAdopting a cloud strategy that includes redistribution of data center resources is complex and many IT managers choose to hand off the heavy lifting to a large one-stop-shop pro-vider that is capable of executing each phase of the project, from plan to execution and management. Carefully assess these providers’ expertise and capabilities in each area of a cloud migration including network optimization, build-out in multi-tenant data centers, cloud strategy and selection, and determination of workloads to move to the cloud.

Specialized Service ProvidersChoosing vendors who specialize in cloud architecture, deployment and management brings together service providers with proven expertise in delivering each component of an ef-fective cloud migration. Enlisting specialized service providers can bring together the right expertise across all disciplines, and choosing providers with experience working together creates an effective team. Partners with complementary skills can greatly simplify project management for the client.

The Right Way to Execute in the Cloud and SucceedThere are three phases in a typical hybrid cloud migration. The first is developing a plan and technology roadmap, including current state assessment and asset inventory. This phase clarifies the business requirements and builds a roadmap to get there. To start, many IT managers don’t have an accurate inventory of their end-to-end security policies (including impact of suppliers), physical servers and the status of their service contracts, applications, and licenses, much less knowledge about how many virtual machines are running. The first phase identifies performance and infrastructure issues, gaps between current state and future state and provides a detailed plan and schedule for the migration with minimal impact on the business.


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Second, migration is more than lifting and shifting data and applications. It is a time to re-think what applications can and should move to the cloud and those that stay on-premises. In this phase the team should consider:

Networking space and rebuilding or cloning servers

Segmenting resources including subnets, DHCP blocks and billing accounts

Cloud access restriction policies, cloud data center access to the Internet, and access to the on-premises data center from cloud systems

Disaster recovery and high availability requirements

Security rules and implementation (server, subnet, grouping)

How and where applications will scale

Data tier design (for example, server/database or single cluster for all databases)

By carefully planning and working through the details of a migration, the IT manager can navigate issues such as not understanding workloads, considering software licensing im-pact, and ignoring a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach to technology solutions (such as SMTP, FTP and VDI) that are now available as RESTful APIs. And finally, be mindful that the migration must not impact the business or other IT changes occurring on the same timeline.

The third and often overlooked phase is assessing the advantages of shifting to an out-sourced managed services model. Outsourcing IT infrastructure to a managed service provider (MSP) that specializes in cloud platforms can offer 24/7/365 operational support in-cluding compute and storage load balancing, application installations and upgrades, lifecycle hardware management, firmware and service contract management and network services optimization. Most managed service providers are also skilled at exposing operating inef-ficiencies and cutting costs without sacrificing performance by analyzing resource utilization and carefully evaluating network strategy trade-offs.


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Equinix, EPS Cloud and Unitas Global Work Together

EQUINIXPROFESSIONALSERVICESCLOUD

EPS Cloud provides enterprise hybrid cloud solutions and migration services, helping enter-prise organizations adopt and integrate cloud technologies.

In partnership with cloud platform and product industry leaders, EPS Cloud delivers end-to-end capabilities to help enterprises build scalable, highly available, resilient, cost-efficient and secure interconnected cloud environments.

By continually providing superior hybrid cloud solutions to satisfy business objectives, sim-plifying IT management and meeting security and compliance requirements, EPS Cloud has become a trusted partner to CIOs of some of the world’s largest organizations.

Unitas Global is an enterprise cloud solutions provider with the expertise to architect so-lutions that meet each enterprise client’s requirements. With offerings including private or hybrid cloud, network monitoring and management, Information Technology Operations (ITO), and Cloud Optimization, each solution is managed and monitored 24x7x365 and backed by an end-to-end SLA. Each infrastructure solution is technology-agnostic, carrier-neutral, and globally deployed.


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How It WorksEPS Cloud and Unitas Global together use a proven approach to cloud migration: a complete process encompassing assessment, migration and ultimately management, monitoring and optimization.

Assessment An assessment and inventory of the enterprise IT environment involves discovery, planning and a comprehensive review of workload/application use and relevant business drivers.

Key deliverables:

Technical discovery

Cloud infrastructure design

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) analysis

Strategic migration roadmap

Business case summary

Once completed, the IT manager has a complete picture of current hardware and software along with detailed cloud readiness status categorized by type, complexity, criticality and risk.

MigrationAssessment

Monitor

Optim

izeM

anage


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MigrationThe next phase focuses on migration of workloads from the current IT environment to the hybrid cloud platform. Based on the assessment, one of two migration methodologies is employed—Lift-and-Shift or Greenfield—depending on the enterprise’s goals.

Lift-and-Shift: Move applications to the cloud without code changes. This requires lim-ited configuration and is the fastest way to migrate to the cloud because no changes are made to the workload’s operations.

Greenfield: Designs the cloud from scratch to maximize cloud capabilities. This meth-odology takes a fresh approach to the workload, allowing for customization, use of the latest technologies and optimization to support distributed users.

Manage, Monitor and OptimizeIn the final phase, Unitas Global deploys, tests and manages the infrastructure of cloud work-loads. Their Unitas Atlas™ unified monitoring platform provides clients with full insight to comprehensively manage the health and performance of the entire IT environment from a single dashboard. And the Unitas Global Cloud Management Center (CMC) provides a continuously managed and supported environment with guaranteed uptime and customer-based SLAs.

In summary, table 1 on page 11 offers a simple guide to how EPS Cloud and Unitas come together to solve enterprise IT pain points through a hybrid cloud and moving IT to the network edge.

The Tronox, Unitas Global and EPS Cloud PartnershipUnitas Global and EPS Cloud, two IT service providers, have joined forces to support Tronox Limited, a global leader in the mining and production of inorganic minerals and chemicals in its launch of a unique hybrid cloud infrastructure which includes sourced managed services support. This partnership is aimed at reducing Tronox’s investment in global data centers, while improving its IT infrastructure reliability, scalability, monitoring, and performance. As Michael Zimmerman, Vice President of IT for Tronox, explains, “Our cloud migration strategy includes the integration of a recent $1.64 billion acquisition of a new business, as well as the transition of our existing hosting solutions to a new model. We chose Unitas Global and EPS Cloud because of their experience in planning and executing these large-scale migrations to a cloud model. Leveraging the combined experiences of both providers helped us make this transition on schedule with a minimum impact on day-to-day operations.”

Once the transition is completed, Unitas will continue to provide managed services support for all aspects of this hybrid cloud infrastructure.


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Enterprise pain points Where EPS Cloud & Unitas Global add value

Cloud over/underutilized

Virtual machines are often underutilized or forgotten, causing cost inflation for extended periods of time

Backend systems sit idle

Cloud migration plan specifies which work-loads move to the cloud and which should remain on-premises for security or application requirements

Eliminate underutilized resources, scale systems based on load and automate uptime scheduling

Limited internal IT resources

Internal resources lack time and/or knowledge to effectively manage the new environment

Lack of insight into cloud providers’ discount models

Cloud spend spirals out of control

Predictable commitment-based pricing from managed service vendors and cloud providers

Ensure ROI by understanding and effectively leveraging spending commitments and avail-able discounts

Managed service providers have expertise across a range of IT technologies and can in most cases negotiate more effectively due to economies of scale leveraging their aggregated client base

Current cloud infrastructure is less than optimal

Oversized, ineffective and costly systems that accumulate through mergers and acquisitions

Unnecessary use of premium features that are no longer required

Purpose-built infrastructure and latest cloud features

Right-sized, consolidated and purpose-built solutions, utilizing the latest built-in cloud features

Moving IT intellectual property (data, in-frastructure, security policies, runbook) to clouds can simplify the transition for M&A consolidation/divestiture

Engage professional services team for infra-structure optimization audit to identify and prune unproductive features

Limited or no hybrid cloud management expe-rience and tools

Outsource managed services with tools that monitor and manage the entire hybrid IT infrastructure

Providing High Availability and Business/Conti-nuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) is expensive

Leverage cloud for HA and disaster recovery strategy, essentially “buying an SLA” instead of funding underutilized assets, manpower, and operating expense. With a cloud-based BC/DR solution, policy-based cloud configuration achieves performance requirements for RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) with predictable cloud-based HA/DR expense.

Poor user experience for workers and custom-ers at long distances from centralized data and applications

Redistribute compute and storage resources to Equinix IBX data centers close to users located in the top metros worldwide to reduce latency and data transit costs. Leverage Equinix Cloud Exchange for private and secure access to cloud solution providers.

Table 1: EPS Cloud and Unitas come together to solve enterprise pain points



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CITO Research

CITO Research is a source of news, analysis, research and knowledge for CIOs, CTOs and other IT and business professionals. CITO Research engages in a dialogue with its audience to capture technology trends that are harvested, analyzed and communicated in a sophisti-cated way to help practitioners solve difficult business problems.

Visit us at http://www.citoresearch.com

Equinix

Equinix,Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) connects the world’s leading businesses to their customers, employees and partners inside the most interconnected data centers. In 40 markets across five continents, Equinix is where companies come together to realize new opportunities and accelerate their business, IT and cloud strategies.

Visit us at http://www.Equinix.com

ConclusionHandling the demands on today’s enterprise data centers requires a flexible, user-centric distributed architecture. CITO Research recommends partnering with professional and managed service providers that have a deep expertise in migrating complex, interde-pendent legacy applications and workloads to the cloud. We believe that specialized service providers like EPS Cloud and Unitas Global are an effective alternative to in-house staff or one-stop providers. However IT managers approach their cloud migration strategy, moving to an interconnected network environment creates a more flexible, secure, reliable and cost-effective platform while delivering the performance and security that today’s enterprises demand.

This paper was created by CITO Research and sponsored by Equinix

Find out more about how EPS Cloud and Unitas Global work together by visiting http://www.equinix.com/partners/resellers/unitas-global/

Handling the demands on today’s

enterprise data centers requires a flexible, user-

centric distributed architecture

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Documents

Picking the Right Partners - Equinix€¦ · The Economic Benefits of Interconnection Forrester Research performed a Total Economic Impact- assessment of companies inter connecting