Businesses need a new, more flexible solution to make digital transformation far easier, says Daniel Blackwell, Product Manager – Networks & Security, Pulsant
Digital transformation can provide businesses with a more flexible approach to infrastructure that simplifies the delivery of services and applications. However, this journey to digital transformation can introduce its own complexities that require a new way of thinking.
Businesses want to migrate data and workloads to the cloud to achieve greater efficiency, flexibility and innovation. They want the agility and cost benefits of sophisticated software applications delivered to them from the cloud as-a-service. They know that if they adopt the cloud intelligently and take advantage of hybrid infrastructure and services, they can create new business models, compete more effectively and penetrate new markets.
Developing a hybrid cloud architecture means a business can begin to consume the elements of different cloud services that are pertinent to its business growth. This could include AI and ML to advance its applications, or it could mean taking advantage of edge computing strategies and placing the application in multiple locations, processing data close to where it is generated.
Hybrid cloud can also benefit a business because it can run applications where they are best suited, rather than trying to bend an application to the operating model of a cloud environment.
Removing all the hassles from digital transformation
The reality for many businesses, however, is that digital transformation is often delayed or postponed. This could be because of the pressures that come from squeezed budgets, changed internal priorities at board-level, the launch of new products and services, acquisition activity, or the need to respond to market events or competitor initiatives.
Migrating to the cloud is also a complex process. As they adopt new applications or services, businesses may find their infrastructure footprint stretches across on-premises, colocation and multiple cloud environments. In addition, more mature organisations are likely to have bespoke or business-critical applications that are not compatible with the operating models of the major public cloud-providers such as AWS, Google, Azure or IBM.
This hybrid architecture is difficult to manage and can be complex, requiring the pulling together of many different threads at the right time.
As businesses look to become more agile organisations, they face the need to change contracts and keep firm control of costs. Flexibility can become the victim of digital transformation rather than its end-goal. Organisations fear having to enter multi-year contracts for services such as colocation that they may only need for another two months while they coordinate their digital transformation or cloud migration projects. But moving to annual or shorter contracts often only adds to the hassles and costs, generating difficult and time-consuming renegotiations every few months. The complications mount when workloads and applications have to be migrated at different times, creating a long tail of services.
Enter PulsantFlex
What organisations need is greater flexibility without the difficulties of moving from one costly contract to another. They should be free to migrate data and applications to the cloud at their own pace, moving into colocation and from colocation to the cloud, as they require. It is why Pulsant has designed its new PulsantFlex solution purely with the aim of making it simpler and easier to migrate to the cloud and cloud platforms.
Throughout the contract period of the solution, organisations can move their workloads and applications into the Pulsant Cloud and colocation without having to worry about the complexity of signing several contracts, dealing with different providers or running up higher costs.
PulsantFlex allows businesses friction-free movement between Pulsant services, removing the need to discuss re-contracts. This keeps expenditure in line and removes the risk of cost creep that can be introduced through enabling new technologies and the transformation towards edge computing.
Migration to Pulsant Cloud offers businesses the increased cost-efficiency and agility of a next-generation cloud platform that provides transparency and control across all environments from a single pane of glass. Businesses gain the ability to switch their applications and workloads to the environments where they work best. This includes Pulsant’s fast-evolving edge infrastructure platform, which enables organisations to deploy the technologically advanced applications such as real-time video analytics. The edge infrastructure platform delivers what edge applications need – the ability to process data at low latency close to where devices or machines generate it.
Digital transformation is almost always a series of steps and PulsantFlex makes each one easier to achieve in a way that no other provider can match. What PulsantFlex accomplishes is to give businesses the flexibility to move at their own pace, maximising the performance of distributed, hybrid architectures as they fulfil their digital transformation ambitions.