Welcome to distributed cloud. Don’t put your cloud in one place. Introduced by artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) and multiple datacentres across multiple locations, the distributed cloud is about to change the world of work. Again.
Gartner defines the distributed cloud as 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’. In short – cloud is moving away from centralised compute to decentralised compute but it offers the enterprise an interesting new twist in the cloud tale (or tail).
Organisations can leverage distributed cloud capabilities to manage some of the challenges that often arise when managing hybrid cloud investments without having to compromise on its private cloud compliance and control.
Understanding the spread
What distributed cloud means for customers that have spread their wings with public cloud offerings from SAP, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is that they get to distribute their public cloud services to their own edge devices and data centres . This not only allows for the organisation to maintain its private cloud control, but it does so without limiting what the organisation can do with that cloud investment.
In effect, distributed cloud includes the physical location of cloud services as part of its basic structure. This may sound like the exact opposite idea of cloud – as Gartner points out, ‘location has been specifically abstracted away from the service’ – but it, in fact, is the packaging of all the bits and pieces of public, private and hybrid cloud and sending them off to various locations, including the edge. The latter being of immense value to the organisation that wants to benefit from edge compute and cloud.
Why distributed cloud delivers value
There are numerous benefits to distributed cloud, benefits that can potentially help organisations bypass some of the challenges they’ve experienced when investing into their existing cloud infrastructure. Latency being one. With distributed cloud, the location of operations will allow for low-latency computing and improved performance across both public and private cloud environments.
Another benefit of distributed cloud is absolute transparency into the location of data. With increasingly rigorous local and international data regulations and compliance requirements, this transparency is becoming as much a business commodity as a GRC box to tick. This solution allows for absolute data location visibility while also increasing the number of locations from which cloud services can be managed and used.
The How of distributed cloud
So how can the organisation benefit from the growing trend of distributed cloud? As this is a relatively new term and the phases of growth yet to be defined, perhaps the answer lies more in finding a partner that understands the intricacies of cloud, hybrid and compliance and that can help balance the benefits of the distributed cloud architecture with the legacy systems already in play.
ETZ Global has an in-depth understanding of the market, the leading cloud service providers and the technology. Our skills in migration, management and customised hybrid cloud infrastructure are extensive and we’ve got the client recommendations to match. Contact us to find out how we can explore the benefits of distributed cloud for your business, today.
