CIOs in Asia are facing tremendous pressure. The increasingly distributed workforce, complex IT ecosystems, and inflation constantly force many to play catch-up. To stay ahead, more IT leaders are building a digital-first strategy to increase agility and opportunities to close profit performance gaps.
But in this hyperconnected world, building a digital-first strategy has repercussions. The interconnection between businesses creates complications in data sovereignty, privacy, interoperability, and compliance. There is also escalating pressure to deal with data explosion, cyber security threats, ensuring the consistency of the customer experience across multiple touchpoints, and more.
Embracing agility with hybrid cloud
Juggling all these considerations is never easy, and enabling an agile architecture becomes the key. While the hybrid cloud is not a new concept to drive agility, having the technology strategy that right-fits, right-sizes, and right-locates infrastructure investments to keep pace with today’s fast-evolving business landscape remains a major challenge.
According to Flexera, the public cloud remains popular in powering digital-first innovation, with multi-cloud reigning as the de-facto standard for all organizations. However, 73% prefer a hybrid cloud, as some critical data and apps are deemed too sensitive for the public cloud. With a hybrid cloud, businesses can address the concerns of performance—with legacy and proprietary in-house systems remaining on-premises—and cost—with less sensitive data processing in the public cloud. This combination allows businesses to enjoy greater peace of mind and cloud economies.
Asia CIOs’ new demands in a digital era
As workflows and their requirements evolve, businesses are turning to a future-fit cloud architecture to smoothen the transition to digitalization. It simplifies the enterprise journey and helps many CIOs in Asia address these challenges:
- Adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI): While AI modelling used to take years, out-of-the-box AI enables swifter adoption and deployment. This compels CIOs to stay ahead of AI developments while juggling the escalating amount of data and computational resources required to develop and deploy generative AI.
- Everything-as-a-service (XaaS): A survey by Equinix revealed that 81% of APAC IT leaders are embracing XaaS to increase agility and overcome complexity. Indeed, businesses are increasingly adopting subscription models to cope with global supply chain constraints that impede hardware procurement. Gartner also highlighted as-a-service models as one of the top trends shaping the future of cloud and edge infrastructure.
- Governance/compliance: Inadequate data governance can significantly undermine data quality, costing companies an average of USD12.9 million annually, according to Gartner. Many find that having too much data that cannot be harnessed effectively can cause more liability, leading to increased compliance and regulatory risks. As collaboration requirements across complex business/IT ecosystems and geographically distributed workforces intensify, CIOs face challenges in managing the data deluge while toeing the line for greater app interoperability, data integrity, and sovereignty.
How hybrid cloud can help: Cloud computing offers scalable and cost-effective access to high-performance computing resources, with tools designed to deploy and measure model performance. This helps CIOs ensure better data quality, manage data volume, and streamline data architecture. A hybrid cloud provides the required flexibility and scalability that businesses require while addressing data security and compliance concerns. For example, it empowers AI adoption by crunching production data in the cloud, while keeping critical/sensitive data and workloads on-premises.
When deployed via a cloud-adjacent architecture, businesses enjoy greater provisioning speed and agility — by moving the right data and workloads to the right cloud at the right time, while maximizing access to public cloud services. IoT is a major driver for distributed, yet interconnected applications that move large amounts of data between edge and cloud and can benefit from improved performance.
Building a future-fit digital infrastructure
Equinix and Telstra International have partnered to offer Telstra Hybrid Cloud, a fully managed, single-tenanted hybrid cloud deployment with rapid provisioning via Infrastructure as Code. It is powered by Equinix Metal, an automated interconnected and low-latency Bare Metal as a Service, which delivers fast, flexible, and secure interconnected global infrastructure at software speed. It also features professional technology and consulting services from Telstra Purple.
Delivering the combined benefits of private and public clouds, the Telstra Hybrid Cloud ensures a secure, always-on, enterprise-grade and future-fit digital infrastructure that accelerates complex cloud migrations, while isolating and protecting sensitive workloads.
- Eliminate high upfront CAPEX by offering dedicated hardware and flexible contract periods with predictable subscription-based billing.
- Enable rapid cloud provision via infrastructure as code with an integrated, flexible, and secure cloud environment backed by high-speed global connectivity.
- Empower real-time, scalable data processing on the public cloud, while storing and executing analytical processes of sensitive data on the private cloud; enable flexibility in managing large data volumes, while ensuring robust security during data exchange.
- Manage data closer to its source and reduce the bandwidth required for edge computing; empower more responsive decision-making for personalized customer interactions.
- Facilitate compliance with greater control over data location and movement
A partnership that empowers agility
Equinix and Telstra International’s long-standing partnership empowers enterprises with greater agility when adopting new technologies while accelerating the migration and deployment of complex cloud environments.
- Managed and dedicated infrastructure: Support journey towards multi-cloud with a fully managed and dedicated hybrid cloud deployment via Telstra Hybrid Cloud and Equinix Metal, which automates the deployment of interconnected bare metal infrastructure in minutes across 25+ global locations. Offer single tenancy to isolate sensitive workloads and access hardware-level security protocols. Seamlessly integrated with Equinix Fabric to connect distributed infrastructure globally via software-defined interconnection. End-to-end managed cloud services by Telstra Purple optimize workloads from the cloud to the edge, including updating, patching, 24x7 proactive monitoring of network, security, and other infrastructure components.
- Speed of deployment: Accelerate migration and deployment of cloud environments
by provisioning on-demand infrastructure and connectivity in minutes via Equinix Metal. Roll out new apps and services globally with high-performance computing anytime, anywhere. Enjoy further flexibility and ease in purchasing, managing and navigating your cloud environment across the globe via Telstra Hybrid Cloud. - Secured connectivity: Build a future-fit digital infrastructure foundation with a secure cloud environment via a dedicated, single-tenanted infrastructure hosted in Equinix International Business Exchangeâ„¢ (IBX®) data centres to ensure data sovereignty. Sharpen your security posture with Telstra International’s advanced managed network and security capabilities, including threat monitoring and management services.Â
Contact us to discover how the Telstra-Equinix combined technologies, global reach, and industry knowledge can be pivotal in shaping your strategy.
Co-author
Sam Ho, Senior Manager, Global Solutions Architect, Equinix
Sam manages a team of Solution Engineers and Global Solutions Architect in Singapore and is a veteran Solutions Architect. With more than 20 years of experience in the Data Center, Networking and IT industry, he has worked for both regional and global service providers. Equipped with skills in network design and operations, large-scale cloud deployment, facility operations, and enterprise architectures, Sam has helped enterprises of all sizes from various industries plan their IT infrastructures, network and cloud migrations and provides virtual CIO/CTO capabilities with the greatest return on investments for his customers.
Co-author
Truman Crotty, Data Center and Hybrid Cloud Lead SEA, Telstra International
Truman is the Data Center and Hybrid Cloud Lead for SEA at Telstra International, spearheading sales and strategic initiatives for Cloud and DC products. With nearly three decades of experience across Asia in service delivery to technical sales, he specializes in guiding customers from legacy technologies to hybrid cloud architectures. Additionally, Truman is a fervent advocate for educating customers on the benefits of cloud solutions in their digital transformation journey.
