By Colin Woods @ColinWoods_  LinkedIn. 

Like many businesses, you’re probably already leveraging the benefits of cloud computing in one form or another. Indeed, the appeal of immediate infrastructure availability, pay-for-resource usage and the ability to scale up or down resources means the shift to cloud services continues to escalate rapidly.

However, for many organisations, IT infrastructure availability is proving a huge constraint. Creating bottlenecks that prevent the business applications from operating at the speed required by today’s digital economy.

But that’s not the only challenge. Your business as usual (BAU) infrastructure probably features multiple environments – typically, a comms room, data centre and cloud. How you leverage connectivity between these disparate environments will be critical to maximising the cloud opportunity. 

What’s more, without robust connectivity, your day-to-day operations will grind to a halt. That means it’s crucial to implement a connectivity solution that eliminates the risk of a total outage which will have a significant productivity and revenue impact.  

The fact is that cloud computing is a huge trend. In fact 93% of businesses are now using at least one cloud-based service (Spiceworks Report 2016). And your competition is eagerly embracing it to enforce efficiency across their business. 

Failing to leverage cloud appropriately puts you at a disadvantage. 

Maximise your move to the Cloud 

An organisations strategy for migrate to the cloud should be planned in a productive and failsafe way. 

Whether you’re looking to reduce your data centre footprint to save costs – without impacting service delivery to users – or maximise service delivery by enabling a bullet proof BAU infrastructure, you need to define a cloud strategy that lets you take advantage of the richest possible array of capabilities.

It all begins with orchestrating your infrastructure architecture to create a ‘Hub of Enablement’ that gives you ‘always available’ access to a raft of potential services – such as IaaS, Connectivity, PaaS, Disaster Recovery or Back-up. 

We’ve built extensive relationships with data centre and connectivity providers because we know how important ‘choice’ is for organisations - an infinite choice of services, uninhibited by your own infrastructure limitations.  

Your servers need to be always up, always on the Net, and can be connected to other data centres – giving you a data centre fabric that can scale as one logical, high performance entity.  

That means ensuring resilient, diversely routed circuits are in place and designed intelligently to give you a robust and always reliable connection.

Counting the gains

If you remove back office headaches organisations can concentrate on driving innovation and business transformation forward. 

You need to identify what services to utilise and what should reside in your ‘cloud based’ colocation data centre, the ideal ‘cross connection’ strategy required to maximise service access (we help our customers with this as well as managing the migration process itself).

Optimising your move to the cloud will make it possible to fully leverage the opportunities it presents. Enabling unrestricted access to mission critical services is just the start. 

With the right infrastructure model in place, you’ll be able to scale up or down without limitation. You’ll also be able to make significant savings in areas like power consumption, cooling, emissions and storage, as well as benefiting from a reduction in floor and rack space requirements.