By Dhananjay Ganjoo, Managing Director for India, and SAARC at F5
In the past two years, we have witnessed a major change in how we work, and businesses operate, from working in the office to a hybrid model. As a result, organizations have increasingly adopted cloud platforms to continue operations seamlessly, in lieu of this change. As per IDC, 63% of enterprises will move to a hybrid cloud model or multi-cloud environment within the next two years, with full/high data and application operability. This means that the cloud is becoming the engine that powers businesses to become a digital distributed enterprise (DDE) in this digital-first world.
Cloud technologies provide numerous benefits, such as speeding up workflow and cost efficiency. However, there are certain challenges such as inconsistency in the management of IoT and applications, which organizations face. This is where the distributed cloud comes in. The distributed cloud can help businesses in multiple ways:
- Connecting workloads anywhere: Most organizations face challenges such as applying consistent risk frameworks, keeping up with the new cloud offerings, etc. when it comes to their single- or multi-cloud environments. Distributed cloud tackles these operational challenges and seamlessly connects workloads distributed across the enterprise through a shared, cross-cloud management control plane.
- Running workloads seamlessly: The cross-cloud management control planes in the distributed cloud enable businesses to run their workloads without any hassle. With distributed cloud, organizations now have a dynamic platform consolidating networking, security, application delivery, and growing cloud-native services to simplify operations.
- Automatic updates: Businesses get notified of the latest updates in the cloud platform. The system will periodically get updated with the latest technology as well as upgrades to the most recent and effective server. This results in a reduction in the back-end efforts and time required to update each device.
- Stability of network: Businesses today seek IT infrastructure which allows them to scale up or down different crucial dimensions such as storage, operations, and technical capacity, without affecting the network. In a distributed cloud platform, it becomes possible to add or remove additional resources without disturbing the network, as different applications operate on different servers. This helps a company to create and unfold in any environment with the pre-existing set of equipment and staff, eliminating the need to build new edge locations that burn time, effort, and money.
- Effortlessly securing workloads: With technology evolving every day, security has become the primary concern for every business. The uniform control panel in a distributed cloud helps organizations to supervise all processes in a convenient spot. This results in organizations becoming independent as they have a higher degree of control.
- Building resilience: A distributed cloud ecosystem prevents system failure, as unit decentralization does not allow other interlinked servers to be affected in the network. This enables businesses to amplify resilience and have better adaptability by making them prepared for any unprecedented system failures.
- Better regulatory compliance: Organizations are managing the personal information of users and many a time this information cannot be stored or managed outside a marked jurisdiction. Distributed cloud enables organizations to process and manage personal information within the user’s permitted ecosystem. This simplifies compliance related to transmitting and accessing personally identifiable information (PII) for organizations.
To conclude, evolving with the times is the only way businesses can stay ahead of the competitive curve. Undoubtedly, the distributed cloud is a technology businesses must adopt to keep up with the ever-changing digital world.
