As cloud computing has accelerated, so has the way enterprise customers are using cloud to meet their business needs. Today’s cloud computing includes a variety of services, such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and a variety of deployment models to suit their needs such as workloads, security, and infrastructure support.
Many cloud adopters use public cloud where applications or infrastructure are hosted by a third party company, such as Amazon, Microsoft or Google. Although the model is a strong one, it does not address every use case requirement. Organizations often use a private cloud model to address security and governance concerns. A private cloud uses virtualization, plus automated provisioning and orchestration to deliver a cloud service like IaaS or PaaS on assets owned and maintained by the organization itself.
So, what is the right cloud solution to meet most business needs? It’s neither a public cloud nor a private cloud but a combination of both. A combined Cloud environment has application services on multiple clouds with a deployment model leveraging hybrid implementation. A hybrid multi-cloud model in multiple ways addresses a whole slew of business requirements. So, what does this model look like in practice?
An application running in a hybrid multi-cloud environment could use load balancing, web, and application services from a public cloud (such as Microsoft’s Azure) while its database and storage reside in a private cloud. It has computing resources that can perform the same functionalities in both a private and public cloud and can also decide how much computing is needed in either clouds based on load and cost.
Now, as you understand what a hybrid multi-cloud is, let us learn more about hybrid multi-cloud adoption.
Why Hybrid Multi Cloud Adoption over Single-cloud?
One of the key drivers of multi-cloud is the change in the IT modernization over the last few years. For years, Amazon dominated the cloud market and still has a commanding lead. But Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud continue to gain substantial traction. The competitive market is providing more innovation to services, resources and pricing. Instead of migrating all your workloads to one single cloud, you can take advantage of multiple cloud service providers.
Also, the possibility of decentralizing your cloud adoption has also led to multi-clouds with hybrid implementations. For example, a team might be comfortable using Azure to deploy their application services, while another team might choose AWS or a private cloud for their data centers. These advantages have moved customers to embrace a multi-cloud over a single cloud infrastructure.
Most enterprise organization are already using a hybrid cloud deployment model from different cloud providers. While public cloud usage continues to increase, the use of private cloud and hosted private cloud services is also expected to increase by 2018. The increased use of multiple public clouds plus growth of several private cloud services give rise to a multi-cloud deployment in most enterprises and a need to coordinate cloud usage using hybrid scenarios. So, let us see how some of the enterprise customers define Hybrid Multi-Cloud deployment as.
- Use of applications across multiple cloud services.
- Purchase of public and private cloud software from the same service provider.
- Coexistence of a cloud environment with old and noncloud IT systems.
- Combination of deployment models for different workloads.
- Migration of applications from a private cloud to a public cloud.
As enterprise customers move to hybrid cloud computing, now let’s see how ADC has evolved in the journey of cloud computing.
Evolution of ADC to Cloud
The Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market continues to evolve, and with various new cloud-integrated and software-centric use cases have arisen. Use cases for ADCs have extended well beyond those associated with the traditional hardware-based solutions. The traditional market is driven by a hardware refreshment cycle, which, for most enterprises, will persist for at least four or five more years. However, increase in the useful life of deployed products will result in declining revenue in this market segment. Beyond traditional, infrastructure-led deployments, we see three separate ADC solutions emerging to serve specific use cases — namely, cloud-integrated software stacks, over-the-top ADC as a service (ADCaaS) and software-based (possibly open-source) alternative.
The market’s transition resulted from increased deployment of applications in the public cloud to a lesser extent, from micro service-based applications built in private and public clouds. Some application segments (such as email, unified communications and collaboration) are migrating to SaaS, but most new enterprise application deployments are being designed for IaaS or PaaS deployments.
As enterprises continue to move to cloud adoption in the ADC sector, Citrix has redefined ADC to enable deployment of applications and services in hybrid multi cloud environments, end-to-end visibility of your premises and cloud application infrastructure and also provide real-time analytics for application performance. Now, let’s see how Citrix ADC is driving customers to cloud adoption.
How Citrix ADC is driving Customers to Cloud Adoption
Enterprise customers and their administrators use Citrix Cloud to deploy and manage workloads from a public cloud, private cloud, on-premises hardware or a combination of all three. Citrix has its ADC services deployed on the Azure public cloud. As we continue to understand about hybrid multi-cloud, let’s see how Citrix has redefined its ADC deployment in the cloud.
Citrix has redefined its ADC as the most advanced application infrastructure platform to manage applications in a hybrid multi-cloud environment. For customers who have their applications everywhere and have users using applications regardless of the device or location, Citrix ADC helps deploy applications, form factors, and data requirements in the datacenter and also in the cloud environment (public or private). Citrix also lets you to scale it on demand and manage all of these through one unified cloud console.
Citrix ADC provides form factors and orchestration capabilities to deploy applications on-premises and also in the cloud. The deployment is modeled in such a way that you can have physical (MPX/SDX), virtual (VPX), and container (CPX) platforms in a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Once you deploy it in the cloud, you can manage, monitor, and troubleshoot your applications from a unified cloud console. One such example is Citrix ADC Management and Analytics System (MAS). You can access MAS to get end-to-end visibility of applications, monitor real-time analytics data, and resolve issues faster.
What does Hybrid Multi-Cloud bring to Citrix ADC?
Historically, we see that application services were deployed with an on-premises application delivery controller (ADC). A shift to the multi-cloud strategy, however means the applications will not only be deployed on premises but also deployed and managed across multi cloud environments with hybrid implementations.
In a hybrid cloud computing strategy, the organization uses a combination of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud computing services to deliver their services. Now, let us see how hybrid multi-cloud strategy works in an ADC deployment.
As you watched, the Citrix Hybrid Multi cloud acts as a central brain to deliver applications hosted on a combination of on-premises and hybrid multi-cloud environments. They can distribute the load to each location and also enable features such as auto-scaling based on traffic volume. Also it can route the traffic to a different location based on the order to handle a search on demand. The deployment can also handle cloud failover and disaster recovery usage scenarios. By handling such scenarios, the deployment model ensures each client goes back to its nearest geographically designated location for better user experience. The central server can also authenticate users and redirect traffic to cloud environments. By doing this, it allows application specific access to users. Even licensing is centralized and controlled based on user consumption. The deployment provides a single dashboard using which, the administrator can manage and control cloud inventory for each location in the cloud.
So, where is Citrix heading next?
Looking at the way Hybrid Multi-Cloud is gaining momentum, I believe this is the future of Citrix. If you’re just starting to put together your multi-cloud plan and wondering how to get started, Citrix is here to help. Moving to our Hybrid multi-cloud adoption, you can deliver a long-touted potential and become recognized as the most flexible and adaptive enterprise architecture.
Our customers who have adopted hybrid multi-cloud can see significant IT improvements, including performance, availability, security, and cost-savings. That’s important for Citrix. But what I find even more exciting is that many customers are growing their businesses, opening new locations or offices, introducing new products and services, and operating more profitably using Hybrid Multi-Cloud services.
