Cloud Connect

As the age of digital disruptions put increasing pressure on traditional industry segments, businesses are seeking to reinvent themselves and innovate at a faster pace by turning to the cloud. On that front, a hybrid cloud offers the best of both worlds by melding the cost-efficiency and flexibility of the public cloud with the control that only a private cloud or on-premises deployment can give.

The challenge of connectivity

The migration of workloads to the public cloud has its fair share of challenges. Probably the first consideration that rears its head is the need to establish robust and secure connectivity between the corporate offices and public cloud platforms. This can become complicated due to the popularity of multi-cloud deployments, and the need to ensure that data centre facilities are similarly connected securely.

While there is no dearth of service providers with connectivity offerings, they are only responsible for their segment of the network and some are not able to provide end-to-end connectivity to varied platforms. These are also covered by disparate service level agreements (SLA) with differing reaction times, recovery windows and disclaimers on what constitutes an outage. The result is a complex hodgepodge that can throw a spanner in the works when it comes to guaranteeing service availability.

Elsewhere, the proliferation of interdependencies in the hybrid cloud means that availability and performance are becoming critical too. For instance, a cloud-based service could be reliant on a directory or authentication server running within a private cloud, while an e-commerce store may need to query the mobile application or enterprise resource planning (ERP) servers at an on-premises location to place an order successfully.

Cloud connectivity

Clearly, the connectivity between cloud platforms and co-location environments is not something that can be taken for granted. But how can enterprises ensure that a reliable and secure connectivity is maintained within the hybrid cloud? Fortunately, enterprises can be assured of robust cloud connectivity though a private on-demand connectivity service such as StarHub’s Cloud Connect.

Cloud Connect is designed as a direct pathway from your organisation’s infrastructure to the largest public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Backed by our extensive network of carrier-grade fibre optic cables, this includes seamless access to top data centre facilities in Singapore that support hybrid cloud deployments.

Forging separate connections to multiple cloud service providers can be avoided with Cloud Connect, while an on-demand and consistent network removes the complexity to link multiple cloud platforms. In addition, Cloud Connect provides performance monitoring and integrated billing that enable the tracking of usage and network utilisation from a central console. This ensures that growing demand can be monitored and scaled in a cost-efficient manner.

Applications are hence assured of high performance and consistent connectivity, which are crucial cornerstones in a world where an easy and reliable connection to the cloud means that businesses can go-to-market without lengthy deployment time. Most importantly, with a reliable access, IT departments can focus on innovation and other projects that can positively impact the company’s bottom-line.

Driving your digital business

As businesses look to the cloud to power the next generation of digital capabilities and services, public cloud will be a competitive differentiator for businesses around the world. The evidence is in its sharp growth – Gartner⁽¹⁾ had forecasted that worldwide public cloud revenue will grow by 21.4 percent this year alone to reach US$186.4 billion.

By delivering the requisite performance and reliability to keep business-critical processes and applications running smoothly, StarHub’s Cloud Connect can go a long way towards removing the friction of accessing cloud services. Enterprises can hence focus on their digital transformation initiatives, accelerate their cloud deployments, and seek to come up with tomorrow’s business innovation which will help them stay ahead of their competitors – whether in Singapore or around the world.

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