How distributed cloud will affect data center infrastructures in 2020 and beyond
Distributed cloud services are proving their mettle in facilitating advanced business operations. Learn more about the outlook for this concept for the future.
The COVID-19 worldwide pandemic taking place this spring truly demonstrates the value of cloud services combined with remote access to support businesses and workers who can’t operate in on-premises environments. Distributed cloud services in particular stand poised to become the true foundation of efficient and well-managed business operations.
Distributed cloud, according to Gartner, “is the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while the operation, governance, updates and evolution of the services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider.”
I spoke with Bindu Sundaresan, director of AT&T Cybersecurity, Ankur Singla, CEO of Volterra, a distributed cloud service platform, and a few other industry experts to get their takes on what’s happening in this space.
Ankur Singla: Due to the exponential increase of data-driven technologies–think artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 5G–apps and data, along with their supporting infrastructure, are increasingly spread across edge sites and multiple clouds. These distributed workloads introduce several serious operational and security challenges for organizations. Specifically, IT teams are struggling to securely, reliably, and cost-effectively manage these workloads. What’s more, these challenges will only continue to grow. By 2025, up to 90% of enterprise-generated data will be produced and processed outside traditional data centers or a single centralized cloud.
The distributed cloud is an emerging approach that will enable organizations to manage disparate components of its enterprise IT infrastructure as one unified, logical cloud. As organizations can deploy apps with a common set of policies and overarching visibility across all locations and heterogeneous infrastructure, using a cloud-native model, the distributed cloud mitigates the aforementioned operational challenges. This is why Gartner named distributed cloud one of its “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020.”
Bindu Sundaresan: In today’s digital business environment, businesses have become more decentralized and mobile to fulfil business objectives and remain competitive. This has given rise to a distributed cloud model, ultimately streamlining location, regulation, and security implications, while reducing latency and large-scale outages. In fact, by 2023, Gartner predicts that most cloud service providers will have a distributed ATM-like presence to serve a subset of their services for low-latency application requirements. In order to manage such distributed cloud environments, we’ll see an emergence of micro data centers located in areas that see high amounts of traffic, in parallel with the ATM-like cloud service points. The surge of distributed cloud brings challenges for teams tasked with optimizing, managing and protecting the infrastructure. Legacy networks, which were designed for a centralized world, are not sufficient to handle the amount of traffic that cloud-based applications create. And although traditional firewalls help to protect against traffic flowing into the data center or other physical locations, they cannot provide visibility or security for remote users that connect directly to the Internet or cloud-based resources.
Scott Matteson: How will the distributed cloud impact hybrid cloud and multi-cloud projects?
Ankur Singla: As noted above, the rise of hybrid cloud deployments, and especially multi-cloud deployments, is a big part of what’s causing the need for the distributed cloud.
