Managing Business Technology in Distributed Cloud Environments

Are you currently using the cloud as part of your IT strategy?  With a wide variety of options and services available from several different public cloud services, you may be thinking about how to evolve your IT strategy to include more than one cloud provider.  Using multiple cloud services to run your business technology has several interesting advantages, but it also introduces some challenges that aren’t easy to solve. This is why you need InfoScale! 

InfoScale is a software-defined optimization solution for mission-critical applications that minimizes the risk of application downtime and data loss to help keep your mission-critical applications up and running all the time. InfoScale also gives you the flexibility to run your applications on nearly any physical, virtual, or cloud platform.

With InfoScale, you can efficiently manage your business technology across multiple cloud services in a flexible deployment architecture, with the availability and resiliency needed to eliminate service downtime. InfoScale also gives you the flexibility to move your business technology between platforms – including public clouds – to optimize costs, service availability, resiliency, and innovation.

DISTRIBUTED CLOUD OVERVIEW

The public cloud market has evolved to include multiple different vendors that each offer a variety of new and innovative functionality, but not all clouds are created equal.  Each provider has a somewhat different service catalog with different options and features.  Distributed Cloud is a conceptual IT deployment architecture that combines multiple cloud platforms – such as AWS, Azure, and GCP – with other technology platforms and resources used to manage your business technology stack. Implementing a distributed cloud IT strategy has several interesting benefits:

• Innovation – design your business services using the best available cloud technology
• Optimization – reduce your operating expenses by running your applications on the most cost-effective cloud platforms
• Availability and Resiliency – protect your IT services against individual cloud provider outages

It’s also important to understand that there are several challenges that can be difficult to overcome when architecting and building distributed cloud environments:

• Complexity – migrating your applications and data into a cloud environment often involves proprietary tools that are not designed to work with multiple cloud services
• Cost – managing ingress and egress operations for multiple cloud providers can result in higher and unexpected costs with the potential for time delays and inefficient processes
• Flexibility – cloud services aren’t all equal. Moving applications and data out of a cloud service can be difficult and may involve significant manual effort

Let’s look at how InfoScale helps overcome these challenges and enables you to design and implement optimized distributed cloud environments.

By abstracting cloud resources, InfoScale enables organizations to run applications using the cloud services that best meets their requirements. It also eliminates cloud platform lock-in by enabling organizations to move their data and applications to different clouds or repatriate them back to on-premises data centers if required. Figure 2 is an example of how InfoScale can provide high availability for your applications using two different cloud services. 

HOW INFOSCALE MAKES DISTRIBUTED CLOUD BETTER

InfoScale helps businesses optimize cloud services by providing the tools to move IT services into the cloud, out of the cloud, and into other clouds as desired. With InfoScale, you have complete flexibility to use nearly any platform to host your applications and data. This means that you can easily and efficiently move your applications between cloud providers.

InfoScale provides several key benefits that help you build flexible and optimized distributed cloud environments:

• High Availability – InfoScale makes it easy to distribute the risk of cloud service disruptions between different clouds, reducing the risk of application downtime in the case of a (single) cloud provider service disruption
• Optimization – reduce your operating costs by hosting your applications and data on the most cost-effective cloud services while maintaining the high availability and resiliency your mission-critical applications need
• Flexibility – InfoScale ensures your independence from cloud service providers by allowing you to easily move your IT services between clouds, and from the cloud back to on-premises datacenters for any reason
• Innovation – by eliminating cloud provider lock-in, InfoScale allows you to take advantage of different features and functionality offered by different public cloud services, letting you run your business technology on the platform best suited to deliver your ideal end-user experience

Summary

InfoScale's industry-leading application availability and data management technology provides the functionality, flexibility, and optimization you need to run your IT services in distributed cloud environments. InfoScale is a unique solution that helps reduce costs and complexity while ensuring maximum availability and resiliency for your business technology – across any cloud.

Check out our whitepaper for more information on InfoScale for the distributed cloud.

You can also find additional InfoScale information and resources in the InfoScale technical library.