How to accelerate business in the cloud

Just being in the cloud is no longer enough: with 90% of enterprises already in the cloud, a #cloudstrategy in itself won’t help you stay ahead of the competition, it will merely help you to keep up. However, there is a reliable approach to cloud success that can help your business get into the fast lane: a cloud #interconnection strategy. Interconnecting your clouds will accelerate your work and give your business the boost it needs.

To grow in today’s economy, businesses need to be digitally smart. Seamless workflows help them to increase their efficiency and speed of production. This will make it possible to accelerate their time-to-market. However, quality and performance of digital products and services are important as well – no matter where a customer is or how they consume services. Whether we are talking about a connected car and its infotainment system, a financial management app, or an electric toothbrush with its associated dental hygiene app, everything depends on the cloud. And everything should work seamlessly.

So, how can companies make the most of their cloud usage? It has to do with something that often gets neglected when managers formulate their hybrid or #multicloud strategy. Even in regions with high cloud adoption, the most common way of accessing the cloud and transferring data to and from different services is still via the public Internet. Riddled with performance and security hazards, the public Internet is simply not the best way. A much more effective way is to use direct #interconnection via a distributed Cloud Exchange. This provides access to a single integrated ecosystem of cloud providers and allows the corporate network to connect directly to the cloud networks in use, bypassing the public Internet.

Connect your clouds directly

Whether you’re working internally with data bases or externally with a chat bot to provide customer service support, the same rule applies: The lower the latency, the faster the response time and the better performance. You’ll notice this immediately when using video conferencing tools – high latency with long delays disrupts the user experience and impacts productivity. Poor connectivity to clouds, such as when connecting via the public Internet, causes high latency, with a perceptible impact on performance. A far better solution is to connect the company network directly with the cloud networks being used, for example via your nearest DE-CIX Cloud Exchange, improving both security and #latency.

Let’s take a smart factory as an example. One of the smart factory’s challenges revolves around optimizing their automated processes for just-in-time-delivery. Data from one cloud needs to be provided quickly to applications running in another cloud as, for example, the customer order data must be synchronized with inventory databases and logistics systems. Another challenge is to gain real-time access to the #AI systems monitoring product quality and the condition of the production plant, or for optimizing processes on the factory floor. These and countless other processes, which may well be active in different clouds, are required to run with high-quality order execution. Low latency makes all the difference. Without question: latency is the new currency.

Therefore, to make your cloud connectivity state-of-the-art, you need to enable cloud-to-cloud communication to allow your different cloud environments to talk to each other. The lowest possible latency between clouds can be achieved by using a cloud routing service, such as the DE-CIX Cloud ROUTER, implemented directly on our Cloud Exchanges. This means that your entire cloud landscape can be harmonized into a single interoperable network environment.

Companies don’t just need a cloud strategy, they need a cloud interconnection strategy.

Breaking through barriers on the road to success

There’s no doubt about it: the cloud is already an amazing tool for boosting productivity. But clouds need the right connectivity and latency to accelerate business effectively. It is simply not feasible to run certain applications in the cloud without optimized interconnection. Every day, expectations on businesses are increasing and they need to release new and better iterations of their products, with new digital features, more reliable performance, integrated AI, and so on. Developing a cloud interconnection strategy will help them to make the most of the benefits of the cloud. The bottom line is that direct connections boost performance and #cloudsecurity while helping businesses to get ahead of the competition. With your clouds working at top speed, the sky’s the limit!