Large public cloud platforms are a common point of entry for enterprises to begin evaluating a hybrid IT solution. The following case study is an example of the type of customer that CoreSite supports and how we serve as the scalable, high-performance point of connection between traditional IT and cloud platforms.
An enterprise manages its own dedicated infrastructure in an on-premise data center. Employees are complaining about network speeds when the IT department notices high quantities of traffic flowing to/from the research department into Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The use of EC2 is an efficient solution for these workloads, so IT staff decides to take control and centralize management of the web service and subsequently increase bandwidth with its existing WAN provider.
A few weeks after this transition, employees are still impacted by latency and downtime issues and the IT department realizes that the compromised performance is due to unsupported software and aging equipment in its data center. Management decides to offload large HR workloads into the pay-as-you-go model of EC2, however specific pieces of the application still need to link back to its private data center. Unfortunately, that connection will require another bandwidth increase with their WAN provider who offers the primary routes for metro connectivity in the area and is beginning to charge accordingly. The IT department does not have the budget to both refresh equipment and increase bandwidth.
The enterprise decides to move the dedicated IT assets to a colocation facility. In doing this, it obtains a direct connection into AWS who is also deployed in the facility. Workloads now move back and forth from their dedicated infrastructure to the cloud via private, secure interconnection services rather than through a network loop. The enterprise saves 40% in bandwidth costs for EC2 and also finds a network provider within the facility that can better meet requirements at a lower cost for their overall corporate WAN. Corporate employees experience improved uptime and performance, and IT employees can move from data center monitoring to more innovative projects to support the organization.
Learn about how CoreSite can help you with your hybrid IT infrastructure.