It’s becoming the norm for companies to move into cloud infrastructure and towards SaaS (software as a service) applications that are hosted in the cloud. These applications and infrastructure are very much distributed, with access points around the globe.
Traditionally, over the last few decades, IT infrastructure and network architecture has revolved around centralized infrastructure. It sits in a centralized or regional data center. This legacy infrastructure doesn’t work in the age of cloud. Users they need to access their tools from all over, and serving through a centralized hub or MPLS type of network, routing users in and out again, has a negative impact on performance of these applications. And that performance impact has a very real effect on productivity.
Enter CloudHubs
For these reasons, CloudHubs are a very important component of a cloud strategy. Cloud hubs are deployed strategically within the regions where the cloud infrastructure as a service, or software as a service applications, are hosted. If we think AWS, for example, or Azure, for example, they’re deployed in regions like US East, around the Ashburn area, or US West within the Silicon Valley area, or the San Francisco area. Companies that have a centralized infrastructure where they go out to the internet from a single data center will have a very hard time accessing these locations or these clouds going into different directions.
Latency
For Example: Say you have team members located across multiple states. In this example we’ll have an office located in New York and another in Indiana. If your central hub is in New York, your forcing your Indiana users to log into a New York location, and then from the New York connection connect to their destination app, which for sake of today’s’ discussion is in Virginia. This additional latency slows down every action these team members make within these apps, adding a lot of friction and delays to their work. In a cloud model, you enable your India team members to connect to the data center directly, removing about 70% of the time in the wire.
Now we start adding things like Salesforce, or Workday, or ServiceNow, or Office 365, and now we have serious problems getting into this disparate applications.
CloudHub Infrastructure
By moving into a CloudHub infrastructure, it allows you to go out to the internet at these distributed CloudHubs, and allows you to reach the applications and the cloud infrastructure within those regions where the CloudHubs are deployed.
You’re no longer dependent on a single point of access to everything internet-related. You can go to whatever region you need to. Users that are in California and need to reach applications in California can reach them directly out of the California cloud hub, and the same thing for the East region, or the South region, or wherever your users are based.
It is a strategy that revolves around expedited access and optimal performance, which makes an impact on user productivity and ultimately your bottom line.
Some examples of cloud based enterprise infrastructure include:
- Office 365
- Skype for business
- Sharepoint
- OneDrive
- Salesforce
- Slack
- Workday
Many of these platforms require a lot of bandwidth, and require low latency. By deploying CloudHubs, or AppHubs, you enable a higher level of performance for these applications which translates into user productivity.
Contact us to learn more about how Apcela’s AppHubs can increase your users productivity or request a demo. We’re excited to show you how we can help!
