Cloud technologies have become the foundation that enable businesses to transform, differentiate and gain competitive advantage. When it comes to agility and resilience, cloud technology enables companies to scale and transform at speed, the key to success for ambitious companies wanting to future-proof their business.
It is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Cloud computing helps to optimise business processes by providing infrastructure, platform, and software solutions. An imperative made more urgent by the impact of the pandemic. Organisations everywhere have had a very powerful and direct reminder of the importance of systems resilience, agility, adaptability, and scalability. Yet many enterprise efforts to adopt and scale to cloud on their own have slowed or stalled. Some have failed to define the plan; others have struggled to make a clear business case.
One essential way to maximise cloud value is to leverage the innovation and investments being made by the big cloud providers to work for your business. Public cloud hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure offer global scale, skilled expertise and numerous services allowing business to migrate swiftly and be ready for limitless scalability.
Getting the most out of a hyperscaler is about committing to a partnership. This can be a critical boost to a digital transformation, especially where budget constraints can be an issue. But decisions should not be made on cost alone, you should look at the support the hyperscaler offers around innovation, digital transformation and engineering. Hyperscalers are investing heavily in areas like streamlining migration and adapting services for private clouds. As data centre migration partners, the team at Alliance SI understand the importance of these additional support services available through a data centre partnership, making it seamless and safe to migrate to the cloud with ease.
Get more from your hyperscaler
Although you probably think of the cloud as a virtual entity, it needs hardware as part of the infrastructure. A cloud network is made up of a variety of physical hardware that can be located at multiple geographical locations. Cloud infrastructure consists of servers, storage devices, network, cloud management software, deployment software, and platform virtualisation.
Managing and maintaining that infrastructure requires a team of highly skilled resources available 24/7, another inherent advantage offered by data centres and hyperscalers who partner with agile network partners like Alliance SI for reliable remote hands support. The hyperscalers’ innovation also extends to sustainability, incorporating innovative techniques to bring down energy consumption at data centres. The shift to hyperscale centres—massive cloud-based data centres run by large cloud providers in infrastructure-efficient spaces—has made sharing hardware resources and computing more energy-efficient. Increasing the use of renewable energy, such as deploying cooling servers with outside air and reusing residual heat, is also helping reduce emissions.
Components of cloud infrastructure
Cloud infrastructure is designed to scale dynamically and elastically. The basic elements of cloud infrastructure are the same whether you have a private cloud, public cloud, or a combination.
Hardware
The hardware includes networking equipment, like switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers, storage arrays, backup devices, and servers. Virtualisation connects the servers together, dividing and abstracting resources to make them accessible to users.
Virtualisation
Virtualisation is technology that separates IT services and functions from hardware. Software sits on top of physical hardware and abstracts the machine’s resources, such as memory, computing power, and storage. It abstracts storage space from hardware systems so that it can be accessed by users as cloud storage.
Storage
Within a single data centre, data may be stored across many disks in a single storage array. Storage management ensures data is correctly being backed up, that outdated backups are removed regularly, and that data is indexed for retrieval in case any storage component fails.
Network
The network is composed of physical wires, switches, routers, and other equipment. Virtual networks are created on top of these physical resources. A typical cloud network configuration is composed of multiple subnetworks, each with varying levels of visibility. The cloud permits the creation of virtual local area networks (VLANs) and assigns static and/or dynamic addresses as needed for all network resources.