I've been working with Hosting and Service providers for few years now, continuously hearing the same questions from our partners. And it's clear that "Colo" is evolving along with Cloud services, and not necessary fading away. Cloud will not be the answer in all the cases, as the need to address different scenarios and IT priorities remains as a constant (Hybrid will continue to be the norm: there's no single size fit all solution).
In other words, customers want to continue leveraging on hosting partners to colo their IT infrastructure, with the expectation of being able to manage it as any other cloud service (and not just renting for Real Estate). This brings new opportunities to cloud providers, as they could deliver more value by facilitating hybrid scenarios that can be "manage" through a single pane of glass.
To achieve this, hosting providers will need to enhance their management infrastructure, by automating provisioning, monitoring, dynamic allocation of resources, consumption tracking; all this being accessible over a web-based interface for a self-service experience. Moreover, the management of such resources shouldn't be confined to the IT infrastructure hosted at the provider's Datacenter but the customer's infrastructure as well. This will help customers to transition their IT workloads to the cloud more seamless and with less resistance.
Depending on the level of control and flexibility that Service Providers will like to have to address hybrid scenarios there are few solutions in the market. One of them is System Center 2012 with its capabilities for Cloud & Datacenter management, SC2012 enables Service Providers with tools to incorporate private, hosted, and public cloud computing resources, while still satisfying the unique business needs of their customers. It organizes existing IT assets (network, storage, compute) into a private cloud that is seamlessly integrated with hosted and public cloud services: System Center 2012
There is an article that provides some data points that came out from a survey conducted by Internap Network Services: Enterprise Innovation. Enjoy the reading!!
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Third time's a charm!!
It's been 5 years since my last post, there have been many experiences to share that I felt compelled to blog again. I've been working with Hosting & Telco partners in APAC, primarily enabling them with MS-based hosting solutions, going through the complete life-cycle of a new offer (simplifying): conceptualization, feasibility analysis, business case, implementation & GTM. I'll keep sharing some of the previous learning and current experiences with my Telco partners, that could help to give some ideas to deliver more value to customers consuming Cloud services.
Cheers,
AMG