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For most of our existence at Cloudreach we had a single focus: bringing the value of the public cloud to our customers. This ran the gamut of introducing the idea of cloud adoption, overcoming any concerns, challenges and natural suspicion about ‘losing control’, and helping to implement solutions that provided flexibility to their business. Having a singular focus on public cloud really helped us to carry our value message.

Cloudreach still strongly believes that all future applications will live on public cloud platforms and our focus remains on how to maximize the value from helping customers make that transition. However, as enterprises are now embracing the public cloud more comprehensively we have seen that there is a need to slightly widen our focus, and accept that hybrid is a state that we should be supporting.

We recognize that the IT transformation journey is not always straightforward, as most large organizations have interdependencies on difficult-to-move applications and this means that the length of their transition will force hybrid operation for some time. For some, hybrid is an end state while for others it is only a stopping point in their journey to operating fully in the public cloud.

In order to provide our customers with comprehensive support for their technology transformation in their adoption of public cloud, we are extending our offerings to cover the most prevalent hybrid cloud use cases:

  1.  Public cloud/ conventional data center requirements: this is commonly seen where there is either an application dependency on resource that has not yet moved, or where there is a need to completely clear a location and there are more difficult platforms that need to be moved, such as mainframe (Z Series), AS-400 (I-Series) and Unix (PowerSystems, Solaris)
  2.  Extension of public cloud into a private data center: cloud service providers now offer on-premise cloud infrastructure solutions such as Azure Stack and AWS Outpost. These are typically used either to tackle intermittent connectivity, performance or data sovereignty issues.
  3.  Control plane maintenance: Rather than move to a full transform of the process and operating model, some choose to extend the control plane, such as VMWare vSphere into the public cloud whilst maintaining some of the platform in private data centers (or not).

To support these states, Cloudreach’s managed service business interfaces with conventional operations processes and we have built partnerships with companies that are able to provide colocation services and conventional managed services so that we can continue to provide end-to-end service for our clients.

In May, we announced our partnership with BT Global Services to provide combined cloud managed services to multinational joint-customers, in addition to a partnership previously announced with T Systems providing broader geographical coverage.

As an adjunct to this, we can provide the localized hardware and operating system support services via our partners to support the extension of the public cloud to private installations, Azure Stack and AWS Outpost, where that is necessary through the needs of data sovereignty, latency issues and intermittent connectivity.

The extension of the vSphere operations is one where the role is reversed, and we will provide public cloud support to our partner teams who manage the VMWare vSphere control plane.