“It’s in the cloud!” Whether you’re talking about workplace technology or struggling to explain file-sharing to a technologically-challenged relative, we’ve all been trying to learn the ins and outs of cloud computing over recent years. It’s no easy task, as cloud computing has been changing rapidly – which brings us to the latest evolution: the distributed cloud.
The pandemic took this trend into overdrive, as employees moved to remote workplaces and businesses migrated entire infrastructures to the cloud. Cloud technology investments will account for 14.2% of global enterprise IT spending by 2024, an increase from 9.1% in 2020.
But businesses aren’t just investing more money into cloud solutions – they’re investing in different cloud solutions.
The majority of cloud service solutions enable businesses to access their platforms and data from a centralized cloud environment. But the shift towards hybrid work means that workforces themselves have become less centralized than ever before – with employees spread out across different regions, working from home and in the office and on-the-go at different times.
This rise of the hybrid work model is driving the rise of hybrid cloud solutions – and is poised to make the distributed cloud the way of the future.
What is the distributed cloud?
As defined by Gartner, distributed cloud computing “is the first cloud model that incorporates physical location of cloud-delivered services as part of its definition.”
Of course, the very purpose of standard cloud services is to disregard physical location – allowing users to access services on-demand wherever they are. A distributed cloud model retains these same advantages while providing new benefits that are uniquely suited for hybrid workforces.
Here’s how it works:
A distributed cloud solution allows businesses to “distribute” public cloud services to a variety of physical locations beyond the cloud provider’s infrastructure – including on premises and other public and private data centers. The distributed cloud is still managed by the cloud provider from a single control plane, which means businesses avoid the complications and inconsistencies of running a “multicloud” strategy (where a business uses cloud services from two or more different providers).
The distributed cloud is one form of edge computing, which refers to a framework where computing is done at or near a particular data source rather than one centralized cloud environment.
Sound a little confusing? Don’t worry: once you understand the unique benefits of the distributed cloud, you’ll see why this model is gaining traction for the future workplace.
The Distributed Cloud: Benefits for the Future Workplace
The key purpose of the distributed cloud is to solve the issue of cloud service latency (the delay between a user requesting an action and the cloud service provider’s response.)
Cloud environments are particularly susceptible to latency issues, as they involve a centralized environment responding to requests that could come from a wide variety of locations. Most activities remain unaffected, but services and applications that use a lot of bandwidth can suffer a range of delays and issues due to high latency. “Distributing” cloud environments to a number of different locations eliminates these latency issues by effectively “bringing the data center to the user”.
For example: if an employee in California accesses a bandwidth-hungry app stored in the one environment shared by his colleagues around the world, he might experience delays and crashes. If they access that application from a distributed cloud environment located nearby, his experience will be much smoother.
Beyond this overarching advantage, the distributed cloud provides a number of subsequent benefits:
1. The distributed cloud enables more agile business practices.
With a distributed cloud model, the business can grow their cloud footprint rapidly as their needs change. They’re able to expand the reach of their distributed cloud to existing locations without having to build new infrastructures.
2. The distributed cloud is more cost-efficient.
Removing the need to build new cloud infrastructures will also save the business a considerable amount of money. Creating new data centers is costly as well as time-consuming – but once a distributed cloud model is established, the business has the flexibility to expand without suffering the costs of building out new environments.
3. The distributed cloud promotes innovation.
Many businesses are also investing in innovative technology like machine learning, AI, and augmented and virtual reality. These interactive tools tend to require a lot of bandwidth, and they also rely on real-time data analysis – which means that latency issues prevent them from functioning properly.
The low latency delivered by the distributed cloud enables businesses to adopt and scale these innovations without worrying that their infrastructures can’t support the new technology.
4.The distributed cloud helps businesses meet compliance standards.
Different regions have different privacy regulations in regards to how and where users’ personal information can be stored – including rules about whether that data can travel outside of the user’s home country. A distributed cloud model enables a business to process personal information at its source (within each user’s country), ensuring compliance with data privacy laws without requiring additional legwork.
5. The distributed cloud improves visibility.
A business can achieve many of these same benefits with a multicloud model, enlisting the services of multiple different cloud providers. But this approach leads to data being siloed across multiple control centers, compromising the level of visibility an IT team has into their environments.
The distributed cloud enables them to manage their distributed environments from a single control plane, using the same set of controls to manage each one. This ensures optimal visibility and consistency of service across all the locations where employees are accessing their data and applications.
The Distributed Cloud is the next phase of cloud evolution.
As it’s still a relatively new development, there are still some lingering questions about how widespread the distributed cloud model will become. For instance, businesses who adopt this model must consider the security implications, as distributing resources across many environments can pose risks without there being additional security measures in place.
Caveats aside, the emergence of the distributed cloud is further proof of the theme we’ve touched on time and time again – that as our workplace evolves, the technology we use in the workplace is evolving at an even faster rate.
