CyrusOne’s Hybrid Cloud Business Strategy Leans On the Basics

As more and more businesses pivot to hybrid cloud architectures, data center colocation providers are working to make sure their platforms jive with hybrid models. But they are doing so in different ways. To assess the state of hybrid cloud within the colocation market, Data Center Knowledge is interviewing a series of data center providers about their strategies for positioning their colocation platforms to enable customers’ hybrid cloud strategies.

Previous articles in the series looked at Equinix's, QTS's, and Flexential's hybrid cloud strategies. This one looks at CyrusOne's.

CyrusOne's approach to the hybrid cloud opportunity rests on the basics: a large selection of global data centers and interconnect services. Meanwhile the colocation provider leans heavily on its partner network to facilitate easy rollout of hybrid cloud platforms for its customers.

Background

CyrusOne operates more than 50 data centers across North America, South America, and Europe. About 50 percent of its customers are themselves public cloud providers, while the other half are enterprises.

Among those enterprise customers, about 75 percent are currently leveraging hybrid cloud in some way, according to John Hatem, chief operating officer at CyrusOne. He added that hybrid adoption among the company’s clients is growing “more and more every day.”

Related:How Colocation Providers are Positioning for Hybrid Cloud: Equinix

Interconnection Enables Hybrid Cloud

When it comes to supporting hybrid workloads, "The biggest thing we offer for hybrid cloud is interconnect," Hatem said. Customers want to know "how many things can we connect them to so they can use as much as they need in their own data center."

Hatem added that because about half of its data center real estate is occupied by public cloud platforms, the company boasts especially strong connection offerings between private enterprise infrastructure and those platforms.

Hybrid Cloud Partners

Hatem also pointed to CyrusOne's partner network as a key strength from a hybrid cloud perspective. Partner solutions help the company "bring the best ecosystem of tools and services that customers can use to build their hybrid clouds," he said.

He mentioned HPE GreenLake as an example of a partner driving hybrid deployments in CyrusOne data centers, saying CyrusOne was the preferred colocation partner for HPE’s data center-as-a-service and hybrid cloud portfolio.

CyrusOne operates a small consulting service to help customers plan hybrid cloud investments, but Hatem said those inhouse services aren’t a major part of its hybrid strategy.

Related:Thinking About Cloud vs On-Prem vs Colocation Has Gotten Smarter

Hybrid Cloud and Sustainability

He was also keen to emphasize sustainability of CyrusOne's data centers, which he views as an additional selling point for enterprises interested in hybrid cloud. The colo provider makes it easy for customers to include green infrastructure within their hybrid architectures, he said.

"Enterprise customers want to have their private cloud that is carbon-neutral" and connect it to public cloud infrastructure to build a hybrid platform.

It's true that green infrastructure is, on the whole, hard to come by, although it's not clear that sustainability is a key focus for enterprises as they plan hybrid deployments.

Hatem was careful not to imply that achieving a smaller carbon footprint was a driver for hybrid cloud adoption. "Historically, the drive for hybrid has always been having the ability to scale," he said.