Three reasons to choose one provider for your hybrid infrastructure

Hybrid infrastructure is a great way for organizations to create a best fit environment, especially for data-intensive applications that require high levels of performance and flexibility. The ability to move workloads across different infrastructure environments, including cloud, hosted, dedicated servers and colocated servers, provides increased responsiveness, scalability and cost efficiency.

Achieving the benefits of hybrid infrastructure requires careful planning. Organizations often decide to purchase services from multiple vendors to establish the right environment for their unique application requirements. Unfortunately, this approach can result in a patchwork of disparate solutions that can cause major headaches down the road.

Let’s explore three reasons to consider using one provider for your hybrid infrastructure.

1. Unified networking
True hybridization allows you to quickly move workloads across different hosting environments without time-consuming network configurations or tasks. A unified network fabric is the foundation that enables persistent connections between legacy and virtualized environments. Using a mix of solutions from multiple providers makes it difficult to put these connections in place and share the same network infrastructure. Different providers usually have different policies and specifications, including the type of firewalls, load balancers, hardware and software they require, which limits your ability to establish seamless processes and automated deployments.

As your business and customer base grow over time, the lack of automation can increase the risk of mistakes, slow down the speed of your deployments and create unnecessary burdens on support and engineering staff. A hybrid environment with unified networking allows you to streamline and automate operations without having to compromise your processes based on different providers’ requirements.

2. Single pane of glass
A hybrid infrastructure composed of solutions from multiple vendors may not include a comprehensive management platform with visibility into your overall environment. Viewing and monitoring dedicated servers from one provider and cloud services from another requires you to use separate management interfaces. Choosing one vendor that offers a management platform designed specifically for hybrid infrastructure will give you complete visibility through a single pane of glass, allowing you to programmatically provision, manage and monitor your cloud, colo and hosting environments. Without the ability to logically provision and monitor machines across your infrastructure, the risk of operational inefficiencies increases and scalability can be difficult.

3. One invoice
Dealing with multiple service providers can be an operational and administrative liability. Choosing one provider for your hybrid infrastructure gives you unified billing and support, which removes the hassles of dealing with multiple different account contacts. Having one invoice lets you view exactly which resources are used for specific applications, making it easier to control costs across the organization. A single bill and single point of contact should be an essential part of a hybridized infrastructure.

Reaping the performance and flexibility benefits of hybrid infrastructure requires more than the right combination of hosting, colocation or physical environments. Unified networking, a single pane of glass management platform and one invoice are critical aspects of true hybridized environments. Choosing one service provider that can offer these capabilities is the most efficient way to create a hybrid infrastructure that successfully meets the needs of your applications.

Learn more about hybridization in our white paper, Deciphering Hybrid Infrastructure.