It has gotten to the point where most enterprises now use some form of cloud computing in their operations. Connectivity refers to the ability to create and maintain connections between two or more points using Datacom or telecom systems. It is just as important as cooling and power for ensuring a data centre can deliver the services it is designed to.
Connections make it possible for data centres to reach the outside world and of course, without a means to reach the outside world, data centres will be useless. Connections must be good and reliable; that is why some emphasise the importance of using private connectivity in place of the public internet to access their services and applications in the cloud.
What determines the choice of connectivity
Besides the technology, a company will base its choice of connectivity on four different parameters and they are availability, latency (delay), bandwidth, and price. For every scenario, an enterprise must assess what the optimal mix of these parameters will be. Whatever choices are made will then affect the connectivity technology to be used, as well as the providers.
Different businesses will have different needs, for instance, while one business might want the lowest latency or the highest availability regardless of what it will cost, another might need a lot of low cost bandwidth.
- Needs of the business
Regardless of the phase of maturity in a business, a certain level of connectivity is always needed. This level will differ for every application just as it differs for each business. It is important for a company to conduct an assessment in order to discover how much the current connectivity is in line with the business processes and business strategy of the enterprise.
Once the business has been able to establish the differences, it becomes clear what needs to be done to ensure the business matches connectivity with both its future and current needs. Also to be considered are the requirements demanded by external forces such as regulators. As the business ensures that connectivity accommodates regulators, it must also ensure that its own wishes are ascertained.
- Nature of application
When a business is set to design the applications it needs to deploy at different locations, the sort of connectivity to be used will be determined by the cost perspectives per application category as well as risk management.
Connectivity between enterprise environments and data centres
It is often advised for a company to get involved with many data centres, and for good reasons too. Some of the most common reasons include:
- Ability to guarantee continuity
- Globalisation
- Load-balancing requirements
- Meeting all the rules and regulations
These reasons are clearly important for attaining a high redundancy requirement, which involves duplication of all of a system’s components in order to minimise the possibility of downtime and prevent even a single point of failure. Interestingly, connectivity is often ignored although it clearly plays a crucial role here.
Given the importance of maintaining reliable cloud computing, businesses need to be careful about the decisions they make regarding connectivity.
