We can all agree that cloud has practically become a part of our everyday lives, whether you’re streaming your favorite Netflix shows, or even engaging in simple communication with friends and co-workers on Slack. This is why when the cloud provider that owns the lion’s share of the market for hosting many popular internet sites and services has a problem, it makes headlines.
We all saw that happen in the US this past week, when many services across the web suffered outages. The cloud provides many benefits around economies of scale and availability, but this week served as a reminder to many of us that it’s vulnerable to outages, much like any other enterprise managed datacenter.
As the enterprise begins its exodus to the cloud, hybrid has become the “new norm” as they transition their applications and infrastructure to the public cloud. This week’s outages may cast a shadow of concern for many organizations that are betting big on the cloud.
This is probably where many must extend the scope of their cloud migration strategy to include plans for multi-cloud capability. As much effort as it takes to convert and migrate your applications to be supported in the cloud, the last thing any organization wants is to be held hostage to that one cloud provider – with no contingency plan in place for failover.
This is where Citrix NetScaler, and the power of “One to Any” resonates so powerfully. Since NetScaler’s singular code base transcends the hypervisor and container, the ability to failover workloads and instances to any cloud provider is vastly simplified and becomes one less widget that needs to be reconfigured when moving between clouds.
With NetScaler serving as the proxy for your applications in the cloud, if servers in your primary cloud provider are unavailable – users can be redirected to backup servers that are front ended by NetScaler either at a different cloud provider’s site or on-premise. NetScaler’s global server load balancing (GSLB) has always served businesses well to distribute workloads across several on-premise datacenters – and can equally provide tremendous value in the brave new world of cloud.
This week should serve as a reminder for many of us that high availability is critical – and when that becomes compromised the costs to the business can indeed be significant. Placing all your bets one cloud provider can have long term repercussions to the business. Multi-cloud architectures should now be a critical component for enterprise business continuity, and NetScaler would be the natural complement to enable increased resilience across any cloud.
